Stuff that weirds me out and then enlivens me....

I noticed that several times this weekend in conversations with folks I remarked on 'things that weirds me me out' often come back to enrich or enliven me.

Like saints, for example.

With Mastery Foundation workshops and stuff we often find ourselves in Roman Catholic retreat centers with lots of Madonnas and Bleeding Hearts and Crucifixes and stuff almost everywhere. Having grown up Pilgrim Holiness in the mountains of West Virgina and then becoming a Methodist after that and then an Episcopalian in college, Madonnas and Bleeding Hearts and Crucifixes and Saints and all that tend to weird me out.

Episcopalians have a Saints-Lite view of it all. Our "Book of Saints" is called "Holy Men/Holy Women". I mean their are hundreds of them, including writers and poets and musicians and folks like that who aren't necessarily 'religious folk' in the traditional sense. From Bach to Mary Magdalene to Space Explorers to Francis of Assissi to James Weldon Johnson to St. Peter to Martin Luther King, we Episcopalians love to celebrate Holy Men and Holy Women. We just don't have a process to go through or require verifiable miracles. We even have a Feast Day for the Book of Common Prayer, the only Holy Day I know of that celebrates a book!

But Roman Catholic saints are writ large. There was a half-life-size statue of St. Roco (or Rock or Rocco) in the place we were this weekend.

He's the patron saint of dogs, not because he healed them but because he had a wound on his leg healed by a dog licking it. More than a tad 'weird', but astonishingly compelling. He, along with St. Amand, the patron of beer and wine makers (Bern gave me a statue of him for Christmas holding a bunch of grapes and hops and looking about the third-quarter into the Super Bowl) God love him. Bless me St. Rocco and St. Amand and thank you for the endlessly wondrous gift of dogs and wine and beer.

That's all pretty weird in some way--but it enlivens me in many ways.

(When I used to do pre-baptism classes for 6 to 12 families at a time, I would give them each one of the symbols of baptism--water, oil, bread, a scallop shell, wine--and ask them to talk about the symbol and tell me why it is vital to baptism. Not once did the group with wine come back and say, "it makes you feel really good". Our culture, even among Episcopalians, is so Puritan about wine.

It's not an accident they call alcohol "spirits"--the Spirit can be called forth with wine.

I believe you can tell the ultimate Value of something by how badly it can be abused. By that distinction 'religion' and 'alcohol' are of profound and Holy Value since they can be so horribly and murderously abused.)

Bless us St. Amand to know the wonders of 'spirits' and avoid the dangers....