Far North Wedding

FAR NORTH WEDDING: David Gaston & Kasey Leffler, married September 10, 2011

Thanks for the wedding.

Thanks for the vows, the blessings, and the rings.

Thanks for the chance to stay at Ginny & Larry’s farm once again.

Thanks for the mild, cool evenings with Jupiter rising brilliant in the east.

Thanks for the wild turkeys calling to each other in the cedar swamp.

Thanks for the rollicking of the seven dogs and the young cousins’ play.

Thanks for the late summer’s garden bounty, especially the corn.

Thanks for the kitchen talk, tales recited and new wisdom from old friends.

Thanks for the long laughter and the opportunity for tears.

Thanks for 33.75 Mile Road that dead ends at a place that was sacred before we got there,

And will remain so long after all of us have gone.

12th Wedding Anniversary: September 4, 2011

For 12 years Nancy and I have been companions, co-parents, co-conspirators, keepers of a rowdy but resilient household. We have not only survived the challenges posed by illness, hard times, and the weight of our own psychic baggage… we have flourished in spite of and because of them. We have learned how to excel in new fields of endeavor, made new friends, and become more deeply connected to each other, even as we become more distinct as individuals. Of course, God isn’t finished with us yet, and we have to reinvent our common life every day. (I say that as an article of faith… in practice, I continue to practice every pathological avoidance strategy… but Nancy hangs in with me, and in the end it is love that abides, even when hope dims and faith falters.)

With my retirement we are facing a new chapter in our life together, or perhaps even a new story altogether. For Nancy, I have always been the “Rector of St. Stephen’s.” For me, Nancy has always been “she-who-is-learning-to-share-her-partner-with-600-parishioners.” It is as if a beloved but persistent relative has just gotten her own apartment after living in our spare bedroom for 12 years. While we relish the prospect of greater freedom, we are also aware that we can no longer use her as an excuse.

At the wedding in Cana of Galilee, the tipsy wedding guests were astonished, not that Jesus had turned water into wine (for only the waiters and bartenders knew), but that the host had “saved the best wine until now.” (John 2:10) We have sampled that heady vintage for the past 12 years, and can say along with that same Gospel author, “this was but the first of his signs.”

In other words, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

THE LAST PAGE OF A JOURNAL: September 2, 2011

On June 4, 2007, I began a three month sabbatical and a new personal journal. September 1, 2011, was my first day as a retired priest, and, 500 pages later, I wrote the last entry on the last page of that same journal. The first few entries from 2007 contain musings upon the death in a car crash of Jim Kelsey, a friend and inspired Bishop of Northern Michigan, as well as upon a book I had begun reading by Henri Nouwen. The book was a journal about Nouwen’s own “last sabbatical,” journal entries he had written that turned out to be his last because he died unexpectedly not long after the sabbatical ended.

Now my sabbatical journal is full, and my rectorship has ended. At St. Stephen’s we spent August baptizing and anointing, crying and laughing, as we moved from one intensive closure activity to the next. All this transpired with a “soundtrack” consisting of loud exultant hymns and sentimental old standards. Now all the observances are over, the last descanted hymn verse has faded into silence, and I find myself inhabiting a strange new landscape, with Jim Kelsey and Henri Nouwen looking over my shoulder as I write.

Strange, but not entirely unfamiliar. Along with Jim and Henri, I sense myself in company with those original disciples in the hours following Jesus’ death. Like me, they must have felt stunned, empty, and uncertain about the future. Like them, I expect, there is a sense of finality, of having seen the beginning and the ending, the alpha and the omega, and that no such public intensity will ever again descend upon me again. But, of course, those disciples were in for a big surprise.

A keen stab of emotional pain brings it all into the present. Caitlin auditioned for My Fair Lady on Tuesday, and was kept until the end, but has received no call. This is a familiar desolation. For me, Caitlin is Ti Moun, the passionate and generous girl she played in Once Upon an Island, waiting outside the elegant hotel with infinite hopefulness and love, utterly convinced that her high class boyfriend will notice her and remember their love.

That image tears me up. It did so when I saw Caitlin play the part, and it does so now, as I think of her in New York, waiting for the casting agent to call.

Except Caitlin is no chump. She loves the stage, and is powerfully motivated to endure the disciplines of her vocation. She will not cast herself upon the steps of the theater and wait there until, like Ti Moun, she turns into a tree. She is already a tree, and, as The Book of Revelation says, “the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

Well, for the healing of her father, anyway, and of her family, and husband, and anyone else whose life she touches.

And I will be a tree also. Yesterday’s Old Testament reading was from The Book of Job, where Job laments his sorry condition, saying “My spirit is broken, my days are extinct, the grave is ready for me.” If that seems a bit extreme for either Caitlin’s circumstances or for mine, well, OK… but not for Jim Kelsey’s, or Henri Nouwen’s. Not for those early Christian disciples. We are sitting in the same church with them even now, and will share their pew soon enough. In the interim we will let them teach us how to feel the truth of our condition, and so rise up as trees.

We are auditioning to be trees.

Nunc dimittus

VERMONT, 2011

Once again, we have visited.

Once again, we have endured the long Canadian miles.

Once again, we have crowded together on the screened-in porch.

Once again, we have fished.

The rituals have changed little since we were young. But now I am the patriarch, the same age as our father when he died. I am the one beholding the antics of small children, and trying to mediate between the dogs.

There must be an ending. We can’t stay out on the lake forever, casting and retrieving loud poppers in the evening, drifting and letting the wind drag Mister Twisters over the weed beds in the afternoon. If we never stopped, then fishing would become the same as life, and we would need some new ritual to punctuate the meaning of our days.

So there must be an ending. My sister Casey does Tai Chi on the dock, summoning the fluid cottonwoods to move with her. Sitting near her on the same dock, Grandson Teagan talks to a turtle, treating his aunt’s sacred posturing as a perfectly normal example of adult behavior. I watch from a chair on the lawn, silently reciting the psalms for the day and tossing a tennis ball for Remi the Dog. At some point we all stop, our holy rituals concluded. Casey and Teagan begin a discussion about turtles; I put my Daily Office Book away and go in search of coffee. All our daily deeds are no less holy, yet without Tai Chi and turtles we might not notice, and without recited psalms our lives trail off into unpunctuated air…

So there must be an ending, a last cast, a final encore, a death.

So, once again we have said goodbye.

Once again, we have watched Lake Champlain recede into the past.

Once again, we have died.

Once again, we have fished.

Once again, we have visited.

Once again, we have endured the long Canadian miles.

Once again, we have crowded together on the screened-in porch.

Once again, we have died.

Once again, we have fished.

At the Church of the Atonement, Chicago: Pentecost Sunday, 2009.

The tower bells ring loud and often to warn the world that worship at the Church of the Atonement in Chicago is about to begin. Inside, almost angry organ-blasts announce a Processional Hymn. A flat and factual world collapses before the onslaught of these sounds and symbols, and reappears as layered, like the incense that hangs in sheets around the altar.

THE SERMON

According to the preacher today, doctrine grows out of communal experience, and the Doctrine of the Trinity provides an example. He says that the experience of God as Trinity pre-dates the doctrine of the Trinity. He said that God is revealed in different ways in different parts of the Bible, and that, for instance, Moses and Isaiah experienced God the Father as an awesome and overpowering holiness, as light, and power like that of an erupting volcano.

It is common and widely accepted, I suppose, for preachers to describe Israel’s experience of Yahweh as an equivalent or prototype of “God the Father” in Christian theology. I, however, would be more inclined to say that any theophany that appears to humans in a tangible or definable manner is a revelation of the Word, and, in the case of events in the Hebrew Scriptures, prototypes of the Incarnation, in that they involve some degree of enfleshment of the Word/Wisdom of God. Hence, Elijah’s experience of a “still, small voice” would be an experience of the Word, as would Jacob’s encounter with the angelic wrestler at the Brook of Kidron. I would want to say that the experience of God the Father/Yahweh is always of the Unknown, the Unseen, the Behind-the-Scenes-Mover-and-Shaker… as when Joseph says to his brothers, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” So Moses proclaimed liberation in the Name of the Father/Yahweh, but the works of power that validated and enabled that liberation were manifestations of the Word/Wisdom. In Exodus, however, such manifestations were not fully understood (just as they are not fully understood by us), or else they would have perceived the Incarnate Word present just as much in Egyptian families grieving over their first born sons as in the liberation of the Hebrew slaves. So the Holy Trinity is often manifested as much in the unnoticed subtext of Scripture as in the mighty acts which occupy the spotlight.

The same is true of our own experience. I enter the Church of the Atonement and find myself awash in visual/auditory/sensory experiences of Word and Spirit. Yet there is also a light-heartedness that inhabits the boundaries, as if Christ had wandered in with some curious street people, wondering what all the fuss was about. “Is that me they’re talking about?” he wonders, and nods approvingly at the exertions of the bell-ringers. He looks around and sees the people ill-equipped to scale the smoke-shrouded slope of Mount Sinai, with the earth’s crust shaking and cracking under their feet, and the wild Law-Giver spitting out commandments like molten pebbles from an outraged volcano. Ready or not, everyone is Moses here.

And so Jesus volunteers to serve as tour-guide, as Sherpa, as expert on volcanoes who will take them to the fiery rim where they might safely view the face of God.

This Is My Body, cries the presiding priest, oblivious to the continuous clamor of the tower bells, and at once the streaming lava and the Precious Blood are one, the absent Father and the beaming tour-guide are one, the Spirit breaks loose and zooms around, and the Holy Trinity is/are all right there in one place, dancing a three-step around the crowded sanctuary.

Shreds of Spirit swoop away on tangents, spun off by force so centrifugal as to defy measurement. Strands of Spirit trail behind, whisps of Ruah, transparent in their orbit, a reverse tornado of sacred breath, encircling the round host, the round world, the curved universe, the curved and holy Trinity, still dancing, still circling, still Three.

The bells fall silent, and the spinning Spirit settles down, like a wide-winged bird settling upon its high nest. The shuffling communicants return from their pilgrimage to the volcano’s edge. Jesus wanders back out onto the street. The world rearranges itself into orderly sequences and rows. We arise, once again to the insistent throbbing of the bells. The Trinity recedes into the walls and floor, assuming its familiar, flat, doctrinal form. We walk unknowing on the Word, and, unthinking, breathe the incense-flavored Spirit while the Father/Yahweh retreats the furthest, where no words, however wise, can go.

In the aisle I speak to the Bishop who ordained me a deacon 43 years before. His eyes light up with recognition. “I am 88 years old,” he says, and so the Spirit moves, the Word takes flesh, and God the Father/Yahweh is.