Another lesson...

Well, I’m through the “training wheels” stage with my discernment group, and we’re on our own next time. During our last meeting, we had sharing time, and we all told stories about a time we felt close to God. I told my happy story about finding my first Episcopal Church when I had graduated from college and had moved to a new town to get settled and start graduate school in the fall. God knew I’d be lonely all summer without Him, and since we’d been apart while I was an undergrad, the Holy Spirit saw to it that I got my butt back to church. This happened via my mom taking me to a church near my home for a look around before she left, and then the Holy Spirit getting me up early on Sunday morning after she and my sister had left. I went to the service that morning, and the rest is history.

One of the members of the group also brought a prayer shawl she had made for me, and everyone prayed over me and Fr. Charlie blessed the shawl. I’ve never had a prayer shawl, but my friend, I think I can call her that now, said to wear it when I needed a “hug” from God, when I need a quiet moment, when I feel prayerful or vulnerable. I love it, and I’ve been using it. I’ve needed hugs lately!

This brings me to my real thesis for this entry. I’ve been very overwhelmed this month due to over-scheduling myself. I do this often, even though I’ve been trying to stop. It’s hard to break a habit, but I say “yes” to too many things, and before I know it, my calendar is filled with too many responsibilities. This past week, I had a poet visiting my college on Tuesday, which meant picking him up in Chicago, getting him to my class, to a reading, and then back to Chicago. We had a wonderful time, but it was a busy day. Then, Wednesday, I had to finish planning a one-day conference I was running on Friday, and then go to another conference in Chicago that afternoon and evening. Thursday I was at that conference again, driving in and out of the city. Friday, I had to be to work at 7:30 to run the conference I had planned, and then I went back into Chicago for the conference I was attending. Saturday was another trip back in. Saturday night I had houseguests, who are friends and low-key and relaxing, but I wasn’t what I call “deflating.” Today has been my day to recuperate, but this week isn’t what I’d call a relaxing week. All that I said, “Yes,” to was fun, but exhausting and draining since it came one thing upon another.

I should note that I’ve missed evening of writing in my prayer journal because I’ve been too tired, that I haven’t read anything related to my spiritual life in weeks now because there are too many other demands on my time. I’ve gone all month without seeing my prayer group, and I won’t be able to until March at this point.

So here’s one of my lessons that I need to learn and quickly. These demands on my time for things that I want to do, and love to do, need to be prioritized, otherwise I’ll burn out and lose sight of what is really important in my life. I need time to be quiet and prayerful, time to reflect, time to be myself and not a mechanical wind-up toy that never gets to be still. One of the shepherds who was training my discernment committee said I need to put some favorite scripture passages to memory. Mine this month has been,” My peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. Not as this world gives to you do I give to you,” from Jesus’ words to his disciples in John’s gospel. I may be able to go get a massage and take a sick day, but I need to have peace in my heart and soul or I won’t be lasting long spiritually or physically!

Just when I thought I was smart...

So I was at a training session for Lay Eucharistic Ministers (LEM) at church this past weekend, and I had a bit of an epiphany, or maybe even more than one. I should start by clarifying what a LEM is. At our church, they are the people who take the consecrated host and wine to people who can’t make it to church on Sunday. At other churches LEMs are the people who help at the altar. So in case anyone needed to know, that’s what that is at Trinity, and that’s what I was being trained for.

Anyway, part of our training included going over what happens at the Eucharist so we understand the magnitude of the work LEMs do. While we were going over the service in the prayer book, Fr. Charlie asked us what we believe happens during the sacrament. So I jumped in and said something about how I was raised Catholic and thus was raised to believe in transubstantiation. We had been joking about some church words being more expensive than others, like “liturgical” being a $5 word, so I threw in that transubstantiation is a $10 word. It’s a biggie. And Fr. Charlie asked me to explain what it meant to make sure I wasn’t just opening my vocabulary wallet and showing a bunch of Monopoly money as the real thing. If you are Catholic and went to Catholic school, you can define this word while you balance cups on your head and at the same time work a hula hoop while standing on a balance ball. I spouted out that it means that the bread and the wine become the actual body and blood of Christ, that they are changed (trans) into the flesh and blood (substance). This led to a short side conversation about ritual cannibalism and what other issues people have with this belief. Fr. Charlie got us back on track by joking that I’d get the gold star for knowing my terms if we gave out gold stars, and asked us what else the Eucharist can mean.

Another member of our group spoke up next. This woman is a wonderful help in church, from volunteering at our soup kitchen to helping in the office every week to singing in the choir. And this woman is one of the most humble people, and caring, you could ever meet. She has been bringing the consecrated bread to a woman who can not come to church due to the cold and ice and snow for fear she’ll fall and be hurt. She said something like this:

I don’t know about the expensive words and I’m not educated like Kristin, but when I bring the bread to this woman, after I’ve given it to her, she just gets a look of peace on her face. It’s as if she takes a deep breath and relaxes after she’s been given the bread. It’s magical and holy and wonderful.

This was my first epiphany. I may know the $10 words, but that isn’t what the Eucharist is about. It’s about the mystical quality and holiness of being “fed with the spiritual food” of this sacrament. Fr. Charlie went on to explain the spectrum of beliefs surrounding this sacrament, and pointing out that both of us who responded were right, but that we were touching on different aspects of the spectrum. I’ll add that one of us did it much more eloquently and with feeling. That person wasn’t me.

But this wasn’t the end of the epiphanies. The next day, Sunday, I was serving on the altar. I had given Fr. Charlie the chalice and helped him wash his hands. He had handed me the water pitcher and the other items he didn’t need, and I had gone back to my post beside the altar. I listened as he said the prayers over the hosts and wine, lifting each up at the right time, and I heard the Sanctus bells ring at the right moment. But at some point when he was going through the prayers, a voice in my head said very loudly, “You don’t believe in transubstantiation. You’ve just been parroting that because it was what you’ve been taught.” Wow. Just like that. I don’t believe that. I don’t. After the priest and the congregation have prayed for the world, said the words from the Last Supper, and said the Great Amen, I think the bread and wine are special and blessed and holy, like holy water in Baptism, but they’re not flesh and blood. At least not to me. Who knew? Not me, evidently, and not my friends who sat with me the training the day before.

It doesn’t mean that the sacrament is less special to me now; in fact, I thought about my revelation a lot that day, and it’s been on my mind throughout the week now. It is special. It’s so special that I am prayerful in giving the wine to people at the altar. It’s not passing out drinks at a party. It’s so special that I understand why we don’t toss out the bread after we’re done, but we eat it all or make sure the birds do. It doesn’t go to the garbage disposal or the waste bin. And the wine gets finished off or poured onto the ground, the earth God created. It doesn’t get put back with the wine that hasn’t been prayed over. And it means that taking the host and wine to someone who cannot be at church, someone who needs them so much that he or she asks for them to be carried to the nursing home or apartment, is a very special and humbling task.

Just when I thought I was secure in my beliefs, that I could put them down on paper, as I’ll have to shortly as an assignment for my discernment committee, I was wrong. I do need to think carefully about the difference between what I’ve been taught to believe and what I really do. There is a difference. And the true beliefs are what I need to cull out and ponder. I guess I’ve got some work to do.

Prayers

I ask that during this time of really, really deep cold, you keep the homeless and those who have a hard time getting or paying for heat in your daily prayers.

I also ask that you pray for peace in Israel and Palestine. Whatever your beliefs, people are truly suffering on both sides. In just three short weeks, a lot of blood has been shed.

I just remembered...

We had our first discernment committee meeting this week. Most of what we covered, I was expecting. I’ve been reading a lot about the diaconate in the past two months or so, so most of the information went right along with that, and I’ve served on a discernment committee before, so it was what I remembered, more or less. I will go into the logistics of what this committee is and what it will do, but I wanted to write about something that the meeting triggered for me this week.

First a little background info. I grew up Catholic, and was in the same church from Baptism until I moved away to go to college. And I went to K-8 at the church, so church and school were the same for me, same place and same people and same worship twice a week for most of my life. Then priests all knew me and my parents were really active in helping with youth group and my mom made banners and helped at school, so I was in touch with a lot of people whether I wanted to be or not.

There wasn’t a huge population of nuns in my church since by then fewer people were going into Holy Orders, and nuns had become a bit more liberated, so they weren’t all as easily recognizable as nuns. Some of them wore veils and dark clothes, but none wore those habits we tend to think of nuns traditionally wearing. There were a few, but not many, nuns teaching in my school, but the principal was always a nun. I took for granted that they were there, that they lived in a house and shared a car just like the priests had a house, but each had his own car. I didn’t think about becoming a nun much, but I didn’t think much at those ages about careers or callings to Holy Orders. Plus, the nuns’ car was orange and had plaid seats, which wasn’t cool. I didn’t analyze it much, but you can tell what stuck with me. That vow of poverty was embodied in an orange car with plaid seats.

But this is what I remembered this week. The priests, or others, or my parents, realized that there was something different about me. I had leadership qualities and a spiritual side. I liked church, the liturgy and ceremony of it. And I liked people, being in front of them and participating. So during my freshman year in high school, I was chosen to part of a diocesan group of youth, girls and boys, who met at the diocese offices to pray, study and discern if we were called for holy orders. I don’t think that was ever voiced in that way, maybe it was called a “leadership” group or something, but I participated in it for at least a year. It never came to anything, and by sophomore year, my best friend I knew we could never be nuns because of that whole chastity thing. We liked boys way too much for that.

I remembered this group as I was thinking about the committee this week, probably as I was driving or doing dishes. But this memory triggered an even earlier one.

When I was really small, maybe before my sister was born when I was five, small enough that I had to stand on the kneeler because if I kneeled I couldn’t see anything, I would mimic the priest at the altar during the Eucharist. I mouth the words he’d say, and hold up my hands like I was holding up the chalice and host. This isn’t anything weird, probably, since I’ve seen Fr. Charlie’s little daughter do this too at different times during coffee hour with the small altar in our parish hall. But I don’t remember seeing kids in church do it very often. They are usually interested in anything but what is going on up there like what color lipstick Mom has in her purse, or where the crayons are to color in the hymnal. My sister would dance in the aisle during the procession as her form of participation, but that’s not the same. And sadly, I had no chance to be at the altar as a kid since girls weren’t allowed to serve. And nuns don’t serve at the altar, so when I was mimicking, there would have been no hope for me to ever be up there except as a person to come up afterwards and help hand out the hosts and the wine.

I don’t why I bring this up except as a comment to Chas’s comment on my last posting. He mentions that he has watched me grow deeper in my journey. Maybe I’m not going deeper, but going back. Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a child-like quality even though I can be very mature. Maybe as I go through this process I’m connecting with something my child-self knew but couldn’t possibly interpret or analyze. I wanted to be a part of that mystery on the altar, a mystery I was barred from even taking part in at all until after my First Communion in second grade. And somewhere in that childhood others recognized that maybe I was supposed to be on this path, but the path just then wasn’t right for me, and wasn’t the right path. A whole series of forks lead us into our adult lives, but all those forks are connected. I’m really interested to see what comes of this new, clearer discernment that I have been called to, and what forks are up ahead for me.

But seriously folks....

I’ve been a little off-hand in some of my posts, and I just wanted to assure everyone that I know this calling is serious stuff. I did grow up in a serious Catholic Church, Our Mother of Sorrows, so I know about being serious. If that’s not a serious name to be under for all of one’s formative years, I don’t want to know the name of the church that could beat it.

Last week’s Gospel reading was about God’s call to Mary. And during his sermon, Fr. Charlie spoke about how Mary took her call so seriously and without any ducking around it. So many of the people in the Bible who got calls said things like, “Hey, I’m not the guy for this job,” or, “Are you really serious?” in the lingo of their day. Only Mary says that she will do God’s will without so much as a shrug or a look to see if she was the one being spoken to. Sometimes I’ve thought that if a talking bush or cloud or an angel would show up for me, it would make things so much easier. In fact, that is one of the funniest things to me about the Old Testament. One character asks God to perform three tasks to make sure that it’s really God’s voice he’s hearing. It would be akin to me hearing a voice coming through my ceiling and my saying, “Okay, if you’re really God, when I get home from work, I expect the carpet to be vacuumed,” and when I get home, the place is spotless. Then, I say, “Okay, so just to make sure, when I get tomorrow, I want this place to look like about 15 dogs had a shedding party,” and behold, my house is covered in fur the next evening. But then I’m stuck with a mess, so I ask one more time for God to vacuum, and He does. As if the whole voice from above wasn’t enough, I now have a really clean house. How could anyone doubt that voice as God’s?

Anyway, this call is serious partially because we don’t have so many burning bushes, voices from clouds or people with wings sprouting from their shoulders showing up at our doors. I really have to listen, and I need others to listen with me. This isn’t a voice we can all hear when we just light some candles, sit really quietly and stop breathing. This is the same voice that we all ask for when we need something. And we’ve all seen the bumper sticker that reads, “If you’re not hearing an answer to your prayers, the answer might be, ‘No’.” But a call isn’t a yes or no question. There’s no divining rod, Ouija board or Magic 8 Ball to consult.

But this is also magic, in the best sense. It’s mystical, spiritual, and awe-some. And right now it’s Christmas, a season full of those very qualities. People who never pray, never go to church, never think about God, hear bells ringing that ask them to help those who are less fortunate, and they give what they can. People who don’t think of themselves as spiritual have their breath taken away by the beauty of a world awash in sparkling white. People who don’t usually attend worship take time out to go, if only for tradition’s sake, but their hearts might swell with the glory of a baby being born who will save the world. A baby saving the world. A person. Someone who smelled like babies do, who squirmed and gurgled and had those funny crossed eyes babies have. Someone whose mother loved him and rocked him and fed him at her breast. Someone whose father looked down at him and marveled that something so small could be so strong. Someone who would hear stories about men traveling over the country to come see him when he was born, stories about a magical star over his birthplace, just like we hear stories about ourselves as babies, only without strangers showing up with really expensive presents, I’m guessing.

So please, during this time of magic and wonder, fill your heart with a child-like sense of God’s love. Listen for that quiet voice that tells you of that love. Pray that others might hear it too. Pray for me, and know that I’ll be praying for you.

Serving on the Altar

Deacon Debby had suggested that I start serving on the altar to get used to being up there. So about a month ago I asked Fr. Charlie to get me some training and start using me up there. He was thrilled since we haven’t had new people serving at the altar in a long time. He got the two regulars together and went through some training.

The training was pretty basic. We walked through a service and I processed the cross, held it again for the reading of the Gospel, went through the motions of the Eucharist, and processed back out. The most difficult part is serving at the Eucharist. There’s a lot that goes on there.

Just as an aside, what happens at the altar wasn’t a complete mystery to me, but it wasn’t very familiar either. I grew up in the Catholic Church before them time girls were allowed to be altar servers. The phrase “altar server” wasn’t even an option since there were only altar boys. And really, during the Offertory when all the moving around is going on up there, there are a lot of things to distract us folks in the congregation. We’re singing, passing the plate, watching the ushers go by, finding our places in the books, all sorts of things. And I can only focus on what’s close around me. This is why when I started driving at 16 I couldn’t find my way around the city I had spent my whole life in. Sitting in the passenger or back seats, I was looking at stores, mountains, cars, annoying my sister, singing along to the radio. I had to ask my mom how to get to the mall after I got my license. This is why I was a little clueless with the whole Communion dance.

And really, it’s like a square dance when you’re up there, only there’s no caller. You have to know when to be beside the altar and when you need to sit behind it. You need to follow cues to know when to go get the cross, when to put the book on the altar, what to grab next. And the whole serving Communion is a dance all in itself with the priest, two people with chalices and then the people lining up at the altar.

So my first service, I just followed. There was a twist since we had an extra person carrying the brass incense burner. I got to follow him and carry the silver jam jar of incense crystals. (I’m sure there’s a name for the silver jam jar, but I haven’t learned it yet.) And John, the incense guy, hadn’t been on the altar in a long time, so we kept bumping into each other since I was following him and he didn’t always know where to go. But I made it through the readings and the Sign of Peace just fine. Then Fr. Charlie asked me to help with the table, which I wasn’t expecting.

It’s not hard to serve at the table, but there is an order to things which should look serious, reverential and coordinated. I can do serious and reverential for the most part, but I’m so not to the coordinated part. Fr. Charlie kept having to direct me, and I kept forgetting to bow after each transfer. Priest hands me wine carafe, we bow. Priest hands me the host holder (again, I know it has a name), we bow. So Charlie would bow, and then I would hesitate and bow. It probably looked a lot like someone visiting China and being a little awkward with a new cultural handshake. But again, I know not many people out in the audience are paying attention, so I think I’m safe.

Then, I got to pass the chalice. Here’s the list of warnings I got about giving people wine:

· DO NOT let go of the chalice, even if the person holds it to their lips.
· say “The Blood of Christ” before offering the wine for people to drink.
· say “The Body and Blood of Christ” for people who are “Dippers”
· for people who are “Dippers” (the right word is “tincture” I know that one) hold the cup low enough that they can see what they are doing.
· some people want you to dip the host and put it on their tongue
· some people don’t want any wine, in which case they will either cross their arms over their chests, shake their heads, or hiss and cross their eyes (well, maybe not the last part)
· after someone takes a drink, wipe the edge, turn the chalice a ¼ turn, and move to the next person.
· after everyone has finished, do not slug the remains. Put the chalice either back on the Credence table or on the altar depending on which chalice you get. The Altar Guild get first dibs on whatever wine is left.

I think I did okay. I didn’t spill anything, said the right things, didn’t trip over Fr. Charlie as he went back and forth, and no one hissed at me.

Then, we made it through the clean-up and I did okay putting everything back as Fr. Charlie finished up. I processed just fine. I just forgot it was my job to put out the candles on the altar, but it got taken care of.

Since that first time, I’ve been on the altar a couple of more times, even when the Canon to the Ordinary came to visit a couple of weeks ago. And I guess I did well enough that Fr. Charlie is going to put me n a regular rotation and give others a break from serving. It’s wonderful taking part more fully and up-close at the mystery of the Eucharist, and I just have to keep reminding myself that no one “out there” is watching for me to mess up. But I can see them during the sermon from my perch up at the altar. And if anyone falls asleep, I’ll know. So be careful you’re looking attentive out there… I’m in control of the wine….

Update

Sorry I've been away from here! The end of the semester is always hectic with grading, panicking students, end-of-the-semester projects, and getting ready for the upcoming semester.

But exciting things are happening in my discernment process. Fr. Charlie has the discernment group together and we're finding times and days when we can all meet. We'll start in January and meet once a month or so. The first three meetings are trainings with two "shepherds," and then the shepherds leave us to the work, which can go for as little as three months and as long as six-nine months. We'll be working together to make sure I'm on the right path. We might decide that the call is really just to keep doing what I'm doing, to be priest, or to keep going with the deacon thing.

The holidays are coming, and I've got a lot on my plate, but really, it's a feast and a party! And since I always go back for seconds at real buffets, chances are I'll be that with a metaphorical one as well!

Love to you all, and please pray for me and the whole discernment group.