Somethiing I've noticed

The pandemic is much, much worse for many, many people than for me. I'm not in health care or police and fire or grocery workers. They put their life in danger every day. I don't.

And I don't yet know anyone with the virus or who has died though one out of 330 people in the US have it and between 5 and 6 percent of them have died. A tragic loss of life I could without fear of contradiction blame on our President.

Today a Connecticut Public Radio host, Colin McEnroe, played an old show from three years ago where he and various experts and news people discussed how the current administration were dismantling the pandemic preparedness of the country. Three years ago, we should have known we weren't going to be ready for C-19.

(In fact, those last two paragraphs illustrate something I've noticed--I'm very scatter-brained these days. And rather than get on with telling you that, I do statistics and CPR.)

I had to remind myself three or four times to take out the trash because tomorrow is trash and recycle day in Cheshire. I even got the bags out to replace the full ones and came downstairs an hour later and noticed them--and that I had forgotten to do it when I took them out!

Also, I'll go on line to watch the news and end up playing Hearts instead.

Or, I'll go on line to read my emails and end up watching news videos instead.

Or, I'll go on line to write this post and end up watching Youtube instead.

Scatter-brained.

Can't do three things in the logical succession.

Now, before you tell me, "Jim, you're always like that!" Let me tell you I know. But my natural disconnected state has increased during this crisis.

I'm not anxious or worried (which is normal for me) but my tendency (which I admit) to not do things in the right order has increased 4 fold.

Like just after I typed "4 fold", I stopped typing to wonder if there was something else I should be doing instead of this!

Really.

That's my only symptom of 'cabin fever', as He Who Will Not Be Named has called the results of the isolation of staying where you are.

I'm lucky.

But scatter-brained....

I realized something today

On 'virtual church' today, Bryan Spinks preached and I realized how much I missed hearing other peoples' sermons. I really hadn't realized it until today.

I was at St. John's in Waterbury for 21 years. I always had an assistant and at least one seminarian and they all, of course, wanted to preach. So I heard a dozen or more sermons in the 48 Sundays each year (I always took a month off for vacation and didn't go to church!)

But since I retired, almost 8 years ago, I preach every Sunday a bishop isn't visiting--which is only every 3 years or so.

Hearing Brian made me remember I enjoy other people's take on 'the word'.

And I never second-guess them or think "I would have done this differently"--I just listen and take in their wisdom.

That's a good realization I think.

I really do.

Missed two days

I haven't written for two days. Not because I haven't anything to say, just because I haven't.

I really hope you aren't taking Clorox to kill the virus as President who will not be named suggested.

His lies have been constant, but the lies are beginning to matter now because if people believe them, they could kill themselves. The Maryland Department of Health had over a hundred calls to ask if disinfectant could be injested!

(My spell check didn't like 'clorox' or 'injested'.  I just don't get spell check....)

Tomorrow is the 6th Sunday of 'no church'. We'll do it on zoom and face book live. I asked Brian, the other priest and a professor at Yale Divinity School, if he'd like to preach before I read the Gospel. It's Luke 24.13-35--the road to Emmaus story--my favorite story in the Gospels. But I already gave it away! Woe is me!

Bern is downstairs below my little office on a Zoom call with her women's group that normally meets once a week but is zooming more often. Bern's been in the group for 30 years. There are only 6 of them, never more, and I know them all. I can recognize their voices but not quite hear what they are saying. Which is good, since no men are allowed!

It was one of the few lovely days of April this year. Which was good because Jesse and his crew dug up part of our yard to fix a break in the sewer pipe for our house and Mark and Naomi's house.

These two houses were built by the same Congregational minister in 1850 and 1860 so lots of things, like water and sewer, are shared.

We haven't had any problem since about a month ago, that Jesse fixed, but Mark and Naomi have.

What Jesse dug up was a spot where Bern wanted new plants, so it all worked out.

If you live near Cheshire and ever need any pipe work done, email me for Jesse's contact stuff.

He's great.

Be well and stay well.

Wash your hands.

so strange these times

I'm going to go to a couple of the churches I serve tomorrow to borrow toilet tissue.

We're almost out and there is none in Cheshire--empty shelves and printed apologies.

I'm also going to get some wafers and Port wine since we do virtual church and I bless my bread and wine and hope those who have some in front of their screens have some as well will feel blessed.

Plus, I just want to get out and drive.

I get mileage from the Cluster, but have none this month.

It's much colder than April should be.

Bern is good at finding bright spots in these strange days.

She told me the chill was good because it made being inside less problematic. I agree.

I looked on the weather channel and it won't get to 60 for the rest of the month.

Chill as well as very strange, these days.

Georgia opening up gives a chill too. And the mayor of Los Vegas wants the hotels, casinos and restaurants open as well.

Slower than needed better than faster than is right should be the rule.

Stay home. Wash your hands. Keep distance when you have to go out. Wear a mask. Gloves too if you have them.

Be well and stay well.

Shalom.

Mejol

(Bet you didn't know what that word meant.)

My favorite of 20 first cousins was named Mejol. It was a name my Aunt Georgie found in a novel about native Americans.

She is 5 or 6 years older than me and since my parents didn't know they'd have me, being older, they brought Mejol into their lives.

I remember her going on vacations with us and always being around.

She lives in the Baltimore area so I sometimes see her when I go see Josh and Cathy and the girls.

Her two children live there two with their spouses and her two grand-sons.

I'm sure I've told you this before, but when I was 14, she locked me in her room with a copy of Catcher in the Rye and a Bob Dylan album on her record player. It changed my life.

So I call her....more and more during this virus thing, because I love her and she grounds me.

Talking with Mejol makes me sane. (My spell check underlines her name and always will.)

We've shared so much over all these years.

Besides Bern and our children, there is no one I feel closer to than Mejol. (sorry spellcheck..)

The calls aren't profound, but they are comforting, centering, grounding.

Thank you cousin Mejol.

You mean more to me that you will ever imagine.

Really.

It's been five Sundays

I haven't been inside a church for five Sundays.

I really don't know if I've gone that long without being in a church on Sunday before.

When I was a child, my mother and I went to my grandma's Pilgrim Holiness Church and then, after that, to Anawalt Methodist Church. My father went there too. He had been a free-will Baptist (whatever that is) but wouldn't endure the Pilgrim Holiness Church. But when my mother and I left there, after the preacher prayed for my sinner father, sitting in the car outside, reading the Bluefield Daily Telegraphy's Sunday edition and 'smoking cigarettes', my father joined us in the Methodist church, claiming "Methodism can't hurt anybody".

I didn't go to church in college until I met the Episcopal chaplain and started going to his 'house church' services.

But, from that point on, I've never not gone to church for 5 Sundays in a row.

Yesterday seemed to stretch out to 72 hours. On and on it went.

I did virtual church, but that is finally not quite 'church'.

I tell people I became a priest because it meant I'd have to go to church.

Now, I'm not sure.

Maybe I would go to church even if I wasn't ordained.

I sure miss it. The hymns, the peace, the people.

Most of all the people and their hugs at the peace.

No hugs these days except from Bern and our dog, Brigit.

ok, 3 sermons

(These are the three sermons I gave in 2005 on Easter: Easter Eve, 8 a.m., and 10:15 a.m. I don't know why they were all as one....but remembering what I did 15 years ago is pretty hard! The parts about the 'feminine' in us all and 'fear' seem relevant to today.)

EASTER EVE 2005

          So we have sat in near darkness and heard the stories of salvation.

          Tonight is much like sitting around the campfire with the tribe and hearing the stories that tell us who we are and whose we are and who we belong to. Sharing the tribe’s tales.

          We have heard the myth of creation and the tale of the passage through the Red Sea. We have been to the Valley of Dry Bones and beyond to the calling of all people to the Kingdom.

          These stories, and the songs we have sung with them and the shadow silence we have shared—all that is enough.

          We should, by now, know who we are and whose we are and who we belong to.

          We belong to God. We are God’s children and God’s own beloved.

          The campfire is dying out. Night has come with earnestness.

          We long for something more—we lean toward new light, the dawn, new life.

          Once more and for always.

          Enough words have been spoken. It is time to be renewed, time to experience the resurrection, time to move on to Easter.

          Now we pass from darkness into light, from night to morning, from death to life. Just like that.

          Now we pass over into God’s joy and hope and wonder.

          Let there be Light! Let there be joy! Let there be wonder! Let there be Life!

Let the words stop and let us pass over to the celebration of the Feast of the Kingdom, the Heavenly Banquet, Easter.

          Easter.

          Easter.

          Alleluia, he is risen. (3 times)

8 a.m.

          It was women who met him after his resurrection. Go search the scriptures, go look at the gospels—women, always women.

          Always there is Mary Magdalene, she is always there in the gospel accounts. Sometimes she is with “the other Mary”—the mother of James, and Salome. But it is always and only women.

          Only women greet the risen lord first.

          Women are, after all, the givers of life—the mothers of us all. There is that. But I think there is more, much more that we must recognize and know.

          I think—and it’s just me thinking—that it is only the “feminine” that can initially recognize the risen lord.

          I don’t mean to leave you men out—oh, no—but I do mean to ask you to consider the “feminine” side of yourself.

          Carl Jung, the great psycho-analyst and philosopher in the first part of the 20^th century, believed that all human beings had within them a masculine side and a feminine side. He wasn’t talking about “gender” at all, no not at all. He was talking about the two sides of every human being’s personality.

          The “masculine” in each of us, according to Jung, was the rational, thinking, rough and ready, active part of our personality.

          The “feminine” within each of us, was the irrational, feeling, compassionate and caring, passive side of who each of us are.

          Given Jung’s understanding of masculine and feminine—both of which are in all of us—it is little wonder that it was the women who met the risen lord.

           

 

Easter, 10:15, 2005

          Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

          I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.

          So, the women show up at the tomb—it is always the women, we need to notice and dwell on that, who see the resurrected Lord—and the angel tells them “do not be afraid.”

          Then, just after that, they meet Jesus, all alive again, and he tells them, “do not be afraid.”

          That is what Easter is about—not being afraid, fearing not, living in hope instead of anxiety, embracing the love of life rather than the fear of death.

          We are so afraid.

          We are so full of fear.

          And Easter is here to tell us, “do not be afraid”, live in hope.

          That poor woman in Florida, Terri Schiavo, longing to die…longing to die. And the whole nation is in an upset about her, the Congress and the President and all the Right to Life folks.

          We need not fear death. That is what Easter means.

          But most of us are so afraid of death that we value the technical definition of “life” more than we value “the quality of living”.

          “Do not be afraid”, live in hope.

          We are so afraid of terrorists that we turn against our fellow human beings because of where they were born or what religion they follow or what they believe.

          I read a story in a book the other day—a true story—about a couple who moved to a gated community in Florida. The complex was surrounded by walls and the gates policed by guards. And the longer they lived there—in this place designed to make the safe and sound—the more fearful they became. They came to fear leaving the compound and pass to the other side of the gates. They came to mistrust those who were allowed through the gates, even those who came to clean the pools and repair appliances and cut the grass. The more secure things became, the more fearful the couple became.

          We have become victims and prisoners of Fear since 9/11.  Fear is the “little death”—it robs us of the joy and spontaneity and wonder and surprise of living. We are locked in tombs of anxiety and fear. But Easter is about leaving our tombs behind. Easter is about Hope that drowns out fear.

          We have made a grave mistake, thinking “courage” and “strength” is the opposite of FEAR. If we can only be brave and courageous and strong and safe enough (we, as a people, we have convinced ourselves) we can overcome our all our fears.

          But that only involves us more deeply into fear and war and aggression.

          The opposite of FEAR, I tell you, is not COURAGE….it is HOPE.

          And HOPE is the message of Easter.

          Daniel Berrigan, the Roman Catholic priest and activist, wrote a poem about a clown mass.

          Clown masses were popular during the 60’s and 70’s. I did a few myself back in those heady days of hopefulness before our culture turned fearful and solemn. What would happen in a clown mass is someone dressed as a clown would shadow the priest—pantomiming the words of the service, acting things out, demonstrating the joy and humor we so often lose because we are so serious about the liturgy.

          It wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Here’s how Berrigan’s poem ends:

                             The children ran together

                       At the clown’s sweet antic tune.

                            In wooden pews

                        The moody regents muttered woodenly.

                           At recessional, this was heard:

                     “Could Jesus have seen that, he’d have

                           turned over in his grave.”

          “Could Jesus have seen that, he’d have turned over in his grave….”

          We live in Fear instead of Hope, it seems to me, because we haven’t really believed Jesus got up out of his grave and lived again. We  haven’t really believed, not in a deep-down, bone and marrow level, in the Resurrection.

          I’m here to tell you Resurrection is Real.

          We need not be afraid.

          Life is stronger than death and hope is stronger than fear.

          Just that.

          Because of Easter we need not be afraid—life is stronger than death and hope is stronger than fear.

          That’s why we use Champaign for communion today. That’s why we wear bunny ears and use noise makers. That’s why we have bubbles. All of that is meant to shock us into believing that life is stronger than death and hope is stronger than fear.

          If that’s not true, we have nothing to hold onto—build walls and put up gates and be afraid of everything…..

          But it is true. It is true. It is true.

          Life is stronger than death and hope is stronger than fear.

          Just that.

          Leave your tombs of fear behind. Walk in the sunshine of Hope.

          He is risen….Christ is risen indeed…Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia….