Hands On!

In the church we have a sacred practice called laying-on-of-hands to pray and bless. Having just come home from a refresher training about legal and pastoral issues on the dangers of too much touch I offer a cautionary tale.

We have a beautiful handsy blessing practice in the Episcopal church. It’s odd maybe to be doing this sort of thing in a world gone mad about boundaries, no-touch, and the swine flu. Nevertheless we continue to do this in our parish.

Last Sunday was the first time we ever did this with a child, a ten year old boy I’ll call Johnnie.

When people are about to go in for surgery or have a dear one who is seriously ill or even when they are moving away and leaving the community we pray for healing or safety or whatever is requested. The person in need of community support and prayer stands in front of the priest who is celebrating that day, The priest invites those who are able and comfortable to come forward, and gather around the person to focus their hearts in prayer with that person. The priest lays his or her hands on the head of the suppliant and everyone else extends their hands to place them either directly on the shoulders, head or arms of the person asking for prayers. The priest prays out loud and the whole congregation joins into the prayer with their own prayers and with their spirits.

Johnnie was headed for major back surgery to correct scoliosis. The rector asked him if he'd like prayers for healing. He said yes and then asked several times When?

When his Sunday came he stepped forward, stood before the priest with his head slightly bowed but not enough to conceal his bright expectant eyes. Everyone gathered.

We made a chain of hands, lines of hopeful, fearful, trusting, loving energy flowed from all those hands into the boy.

I was there as the assisting priest that day and told Johnnie I would place one of my hands directly on his back in the place where the spinal correction would be effected. He nodded, his crop of dark hair skimming his eyebrows. I thought what a beautiful boy he was.

When I first became a priest and did this blessing I worried about where the right words would come from There are formulaic prayers in our prayer book, but we usually count on the Spirit to give us the best words. And She does!

Spirit-inspired prayers are some of the most moving. Silent touching focused prayers are some of the most moving. They come from many hearts all beating their love into the heart of the one in need.

This day the prayer words were not only eloquent but simple and specific, including blessings for courage and soothing of anxiety for Johnnie’s parents and siblings all there with their hands on their son and brother. I pressed my hand firmly into Johnnie’s back. His little five year old sister did too, her eyes wide open in awe.

This was a holy moment, a community moment, a godly moment. There was enough spirit around and tears and sweetness to guard against both swine flu and the succumbing to the currrent cultural affliction I call boundary paranoia and touch-panic. What price Love?

Everyone knows prayer is no guarantee of outcome but we do it together anyway because it matters to us and it matters to God and it matters to our relationship.

In Johnnie’s case, the surgery went well. He will be home soon. He has a new lap top to keep him from wanting to run and play and get rough and tumble and risk jeopardizing his recovery. His mother and father will need prayers to keep him down. But his deformity will not follow him through his life creating worse and worse pain and giving him a bent body as he ages.

And he will never forget the laying-on-of-hands he received on May, 2009, in the Easter season from the hands of a small Christina community at St. John's Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts —hands of people who didn't all know him well but who all love him well.

Johnnie’s will carry this love in his body for the rest of his life; he will remember this day in his flesh forever.

This is the point of religious community, isn’t it?

The Tortoise and the Hare

Recently I’ve been aware of a racy restless tension roiling around inside my soul as well as my gut. I’m impatient. time is more finite than I’ve ever experienced it before. And, though I’m not old, I’m getting old anyway.

There are days I wonder if even Godde can keep up with me!

My questions of the day to myself is: Do I have too much hare energy and not enough tortoise energy in my fuel tank? Do I have too much hare wisdom and not enough tortoise wisdom commandeering my mind?

Then I look around me and wonder if the whole culture, at least in my northeastern corner of the states is over-hared and under-tortoised. People honk when it‘s obvious that the line of traffic can not move. I don’t see much meandering along the streets. People on the subways hang their sleepy heads in exhaustion at the end of the day. Kids seem over-programmed. When do they play?

I have no good answers except the usual bromide about getting balanced. I love my hare and I love my tortoise, BOTH.

Today I will try to remember my tortoise and praise her for her slow steadiness of spirit. They say she wins the race, but I don’t think that’s really true. The hare can win if she’d take a second to stop and kiss the tortoise, maybe take a minute to stand on her back to view the scenery and come back to check on her progress. And the tortoise could pick it up a little too.

Then again they could travel together and cross the finish line of whatever together.

And what if there isn’t even a race!?

Memoir Musings Part Seven: Ordinations journey

How many ordinations does it take to make a priest? God knows!

In seeking an organizing structure for my personal/professional journey I have come up with the word-theme ordination and a new title, Ordinations:Becoming a Priest From the Inside Out.
When I play with words I look first at derivation, even before definition. There I often find clues to the word’s soul, where it was born and what its true meaning or vocation is. Ordination comes from the Latin root ordinatio, to put in order.

By definition, ordination means the act of making someone a member of the clergy, conferring on someone the authority of a sacred office, which can mean that the person has the status of the office but may not be clergy. In some traditions for example, lay people are “ordained” to serve for a time as an officer in the church.

Ordination also can mean the ceremony by which this ordering takes place.

By the traditional Anglican understanding of ordination (with a courteous bow to Luther's great idea of the priesthood of all believers conferred upon all Christians at baptism), you could analogize and say that ordination is to priesthood as authorization is to your credit card. Religious ordination is a sacrament of grace and it also means you have institutional sanction to do what priests do in an official capacity. You’re card-carrying.

I’ve come to see that I have had many ordinations in my life, significant occasions in which my personal life has aligned itself with my vocation as a priest before I became a priest in the Church. In all these ordinations I have felt authorized, ordained by the presence of the Spirit rising up from within me or conferred upon me by external means. My ordinations have always reset my course in some way, have always given me both new life and challenging tasks and have always authorized me to do something new.

They happen in prayer, in adversity, through significant relationships, in wilderness, wrestling with Church politics, rejection, compulsions and sins.

My book chapters weave personal themes with professional categories like a tapestry, following my ordinations path from the first one under the table when I was three to the official one by the Church when I was fifty.

It took a long time and much ordaining to get my spiritual ordination together with my religious ordination, but I’ve actually been an ordained priest for sixty-seven years not twenty-one.

Memoir Musings Part Six: Why?

Theologian and prolific author of religiospiritual (my new word, like it?) books Reinhold Niebuhr once said that clergy should have morning coffee with the New York Times in one hand and the Bible in the other. Today I actually did that by mistake. I was reading about the swine flu pandemic panic in the NYTimes and looking up a biblical reference almost simultaneously. Skimming through the gospel of Mark looking for something else my eye fell on the story of the demoniac who had so many “demons” he called himself Legion and challenged Jesus to heal him. Jesus tapped into his healing powers, cast out the guy’s “demons” (all of them) and sent them scurrying into a herd of swine grazing on the hillside. The swine, now bedeviled, ran crazed over the cliff and into the sea. So you see . . . it was Jesus’ fault that we have swine flu. If he hadn’t cast the toxins into the swine we’d be fine!!!

One of the things that confronted me regularly while I wandered around in the middle of my life went something like this: Are you crazy? Why do you want to be ordained? You won’t make much money and you are anatomically incorrect! Wisdom can clang.

The question made sense though. The law had changed to admit women to the ranks of Holy Orders. (This is a term reserved for those who are ordained clergy. I find it offensive. Are we to presume that the lay order of ministry is not holy?) But attitudes had not changed to keep up with legal requirements. I got caught in the gap, really chasm, between law and attitude. So did many other women.

The clergy club had been exclusively male for so long that women’s ways and wiles sent shock waves of Richter proportions rippling. Continuing this journey could be more difficult than getting through losses (deaths of sister and father, recalcitrant asthma and puffed cheeks from steroids, divorce, rejection by Church, cat dies too!) So why did I want this thing so fervently? Ridiculous my mother would say. And indeed it was so.

I only had one answer and it wasn’t enough to cause the walls of Jericho to come tumbling down for me as the song says and the biblical story relates.

Here’s why I wanted to be ordained a priest, not necessarily a rector (parish CEO type) but a priest of Word and Sacrament as the Anglican tradition defines the ministry of priesthood, the particular way priests are called to love God and people. Here it is in a nutshell: my first "ordination."

When I was three I was afraid of a glass, not just any glass. This glass was triangle-shaped, had a long stem, was filled with clear liquid and two enormous green cross eyed olives that stared out at me with menace as my father twirled the stem between his thumb and forefinger. He looked at his glass with all the affection I wanted for myself. The glass commanded all his attention and my mother’s too. The cocktail hour happened every night. I knew from a book that it was supposed to be the children’s hour, so, driven by longing and anger I snitched Ritz crackers from the cocktail tray and sought refuge under the big dining room table with the cross beams joining its legs and the cloth to the floor. There I placed the crackers on the cross beams and began to chatter-preach to my four imaginary friends and a fourth friend I called God. My friends talked back and didn’t listen, but God listened to all my woes and tales of my adventures and mysteriously communicated to me that I mattered—a lot. I was a child gathering a community and distributing Ritz crackers under a table to invisible communicants, one of them God. My nightly ritual seemed Ritz-cracker holy to me, the kind of meal I could cook and serve and love doing it.

The rest is commentary.

(If you are enjoying and following this series I hope you will comment and thanks to you who have. I plan to post most every Wednesday. I know it's Tuesday but I'm off to visit my home town, NYC , for a few days.)

I remain a Facebook resister but am tempted by tweet/twitter—such cute avian words.

Memoir Musings Part Five: Owlish Love

I have a little owl—gift from a good friend who knows the owl is my spirit animal or totem. My owl is one in my large collection and my favorite. In fact she has wormed her way into my marriage partner’s heart too so she sleeps between us. 
 She is square, not intellectually just anatomically. She is four by four by four, soft and furry, charcoal gray with a heart-shaped white face and white ruff; she has a small dark brown plastic beak, two large yellow eyes and two brown plastic owl feet, hardly fierce talons. I named my wee owl Little Miss Wise-A--. She gives me wisdom in the night, and if not she gives me love just by burrowing into the side of my neck as I fall asleep.

My owl represents Divine Wisdom, Sophia in Greek, wisdom that is both objective and subjective at the same time. That’s a difficult tension for me to hold together sometimes. I want to be warm and fuzzy like my furry ball of an owl. I want to immerse myself in Love —merge, fuse, forget boundaries. I also want to hit the nail on the head of insight as Miss Wise can with her sharp beak and the glare of her eyes.

I haven’t written about owls in my memoir, but I have no doubt that the blend of owlish love inspires my writing. I may write some dramatic scene, drown in my own pathos, lose myself in myself, and invite readers to feel along with me. It’s good for empathy. If I get out of balance, abandoning objectivity altogether, the beak brings me back.

After my sister had died, my father had died, I has been turned down once more by the church, and I was divorced and suddenly single, I laid my head down on my desk and figuratively buried myself in the owl’s furry breast of subjectivity. Suddenly I felt a tough peck somewhere in my gut, like a little beak. It put me back in balance saying, “No one can take this away from you."

It sounds harsh, but it was accurate, true. I didn’t feel scorned, simply set free, made whole, saved from feeling too sorry for myself.

This is how God aka Owl, Wisdom, Sophia, Spirit works within me, pulling me back in balance.
Some days I dare to think that we are writing together, so intimate have I dared to let myself feel with this inner divinity. But I suppose that’s the point, isn’t it?— the point of Love.

My writing style can be blunt like a beak. Sometimes my language can be crude, unbecoming according to expectations for a religious professional. It’s just pointed like a beak. I’m warm not cozy. No one would accuse me of being sweet and sunny-side-up, which is why I appreciate Miss Wise-A-- with her beak but also her night time softness, why I’m drawn to moonlight more than sunlight, and wilderness more than civilization.

In the wilderness of my middle years I found out that God is mother and milk, beak and fur, achievement and failure. Simply so. In the wilderness I began to love the inner grace of ordination as much as its outer sign in priesthood. In the wilderness I was ordained.

I was also ordained priest in the Episcopal church in 1988.

Memoir Musings Part Four: Lady Wisdom

It's TAX day! Some of us enjoy the privilege of paying taxes that others who can't pay may enjoy needed services provided the government manages tax and service with equity and generosity in balance. If you can swallow that sentence whole and digest it without much argument you're in balance yourself!

One of my favorite biblical characters turned out to be Lady Wisdom, spirit of creativity and formation. Wisdom is portrayed as the feminine face of God, God’s sidekick in all things. Without Wisdom you don’t get very far in life. I’d valued wisdom, the integration of knowledge with experience, but had often confused it with bookishness, reading more than I digested and way more than I could possibly use—or integrate.

Biblical Wisdom calls us to “lay aside immaturity” (Prov 7:6a) She invites us to the table to eat of the meal she has prepared and drink of the wine she has mixed. She confirmed for me my principal reason for wanting to be a priest.

Wisdom was female now. I couldn’t afford to be without her, apocryphal or not. I prayed for ordination and for Wisdom, my vocational arc increasingly bending like a birch toward a truth I trusted: that all life is sacred, sacramental, everything a visible sign of an invisible grace, everyone holy.

As I read about Wisdom, I learned she had many fine attributes, more than her Boss in fact. One of her qualities listed in the Book of Wisdom is shrewdness. I loved that. Shrewd is related to the now obsolete shrew, something I once heard my father call my mother. Shrewdness enables someone to make astute judgments sometimes without cold hard facts. It’s like cunning and maybe wily, which brings me straight to the holiness of many biblical women who used their wiles to seduce dangerous men and eliminate (murder) them as enemies of the plans of God. May not be the best ethics or theology but in a power-happy world what can you expect even if you don’t approve? Today the same.

Wisdom, shrewd and wily, also seemed like a divine kind of mother to me, one who trains her children in survival skills, who teaches all her children wisdom, and fills them with joy. I also read: “At first she will walk with them on tortuous paths; she will bring fear and dread upon them and will torment them by her discipline until she trusts them.” (Sirach 4: 17)

What kind of mother was that? Well, maybe Mother Church. She could fill me with dread and fear and torture me with her closed doors. When would I be trusted? I wondered as I wandered.

All I could do was keep on, keep on, keep on. I got lots of support, lots of “milk” along the way. But the wilderness could be lonely. Friends and family got sick of my laments and my desires, to say nothing of my radicalized politics.

Determination to achieve my goal made me gritty.

As the years went by I reared four children, went to seminary, did everything in the parish church that I could except join Altar Guild—enough washing and ironing at home. I developed spiritual muscle. I grew tall inside. Adversity, not comfort, shapes souls.

A tender sorrow accompanied me, but it wasn’t bitter and no longer overwhelmed me. My own true voice began to sound more and more like the voice of divine Wisdom I’d heard from time to time inside myself.

That inner voice had awakened me and set me on the wilderness path in the first place. It spoke one day when I was baking chocolate chip cookies, batch # 1 million. They were good and brought pleasure and I was a good mother, but God-in-me gave me Wisdom who said, “Why are you doing this?”

Now I was in the wilderness trying to answer that simple shrewd question, trying to make it to the promised land which I thought was ordination.

Once along my “prayerful” obsessive way Wisdom interrupted me saying, “Lyn, I don’t care if you’re ordained.” Insulted as I felt, She made me laugh. Wisdom can be fresh—funny with a bite. But I suppose she takes her assignments seriously.

Memoir Musings Part Three: Staying the Course

It’s Holy Week, an important one for Christians. We remember the events leading up to Jesus’ death and resurrection and we honor all our own grief and pain and place our trust once again in the hope that we have a God who reaches into our worst darkness, even death, and raises us up body and soul together, wounds and all. In these days we all have our own memories of death and resurrection.

I had experienced myself and life in a sacramental way by instinct from childhood. My movement towards priesthood seemed obvious. All I had to do was turn myself inside out. I thought the Church would be, well, nice.

It took a record-setting eleven years for me to get ordained, the usual time being four or five years. I stayed alive in the wilderness by thinking that if only I got ordained . . . what? My father would love me as I am? My mother would acknowledge my authority as an adult? I’d be happily married? All my life my way of establishing myself in the world had been by achieving, one glittering triumph after another. Now I was stopped cold.

All one can achieve in a wilderness is survival.

God as well as my self, my direction, my values, my vocational track, came under scrutiny and into question in my wilderness.

Going to seminary whether the Church liked it or not felt deliciously defiant—also dangerous. Sometimes in a wilderness you just have to find a building, a temporary shelter, a tent even— and of course a library! Falling in love with the bible and its motley cast of characters raised my spirits. In the bible, a best seller I’d never understood, I found vocabulary for some of my own spiritual experience.

For example, when, at three under the dining room table, I’d sit and chat to my imaginary friends who never listened and to God who did listen, I felt that I mattered. I received the gift of the authority of my selfhood without any judgment or abandonment. The psalmist calls it feeling yourself to be “the apple of God’s eye.”

Personal authority and belonging came together for me under that table. This “marriage” is rare if at all in a world full of fear, but perhaps it’s a gift only God can give, a gift of love not conferred as reward or power except the power of one’s being. I feel it in my body of flesh when my spiritual body takes residence in every bone, muscle, sinew. I feel alive even when I’m tired of trying. It’s what helped me stay the course.

Recently a woman in my yoga class asked me what I did. I told her I was an Episcopal priest to which she replied “Oh, I’m done with all that religion. I was raised in the Catholic church. My mother believes every word.” I told her I had many doubts myself. She said something like “We’re all just light, Just light. None of this matters.” She patted her body. I resisted for once a little sermonette on incarnational theology, simply saying. “You are a beautiful, graceful athlete. Your body is Light, sacred all by itself.” She looked stunned.

Our conversation ended and I don’t know what she thought. But that’s the way we connect isn’t it, by sharing what matters most to us with each other? I know I’m thinking of what I call the “light of Christ” in a more expansive way because of her Light.