Loss of power

From our friend Barbara Crafton in New Jersey...

SOME OF OUR POWER

I think of them whenever our electricity goes off -- the generations of human beings for whom this was the way life was, people who rose with the sun and slept with the moon. People whose houses were always cold in winter. People who could not read at night unless by candlight. They far outnumber us: electrification is a newcomer to human experience.

At times like this, I long to see them. I sit by the fire with a shawl covering my legs and another my shoulders, and I worry about their attire: if it was this chilly, how on earth did the women endure the décolletage we know characterized their dress in Jane Austen's time? How did the men of the 18th century endure knee pants? Or might we have imagined the whole thing, egged on by the hyperactive imaginations of their portraitists and our filmmakers? No, we did not: some of their clothing remains. You can visit it in museums.

Their great-grandchildren queue up anxiously to buy matches, for water in bottles, for ice in bags, fretting about the endangered contents of our freezers. We dread the absence of our electrical genie before it occurs, calling and texting each other about the impending disaster. Have you lost power yet? What about your mom? Does she have power?

"Power," we call it. We have no power. This is our third day without power. As if the departure of electricity were the loss of all our power. It is not. It is the loss of SOME of our power, not all of it.

We were almost out of bread before the hurricane hit, and our oven is electric. This was the opportunity for which I've been waiting for years: the chance to test a contention of my grandmother's that has always seemed nonsensical to me. She never liked the newfangled stove my mother had. You can't control the fire, she would fume, like you can in a wood stove.

What?!? The stove of my childhood was primitive indeed by today's standards, but it had dials with exact temperatures on them.

No, no, she insisted. It doesn't get hot fast enough and you can't adjust it fast enough. Wood is so much easier.

In memory of her, then, as well as out of necessity, I decided to bake our bread in the fireplace. I banked hot coals up around my iron pot and put the lid on, leaving it there to get really hot. Then in went the bread and back went the lid. My internal dialogue with my grandmother began:

Me: This won't work. It's a waste of good flour. There are no temperature gauges.

My Grandmother: Yes it will. People who couldn't even read have been baking bread like this for thousands of years.

Me: Maybe I need to bake it longer? How will I know?

My Grandmother: Trial and error. That's basically how we know everything.

Half an hour into the baking, I removed the lid and looked at the loaf, expecting something pasty and unappetizingly pale. But no: it was brown and gorgeous -- browner, in fact, than it is at this stage in my fabulous new oven. Hmmmn.

In fifteen minutes, it was done. It looked wonderful. I sliced off the heel when it had cooled. I don't really eat bread any more, but this was an emergency. I had an argument with my dead grandmother to win.

Damned if the woman wasn't right. It was good. Better than in my new oven? I'm not sure. I'd better have another slice.

Copyright © 2001-2012 Barbara Crafton - all rights reserved

The Geranium Farm

Prayer in the hard times: Our day with Barbara Crafton at St. Paul's

We had a very rich Saturday with author Barbara Crafton, and she will be with us in the pulpit Sunday at the 8 am and 10 am worship services at St. Paul's.

Barbara, who is an Episcopal priest, sat on a chair in front of the Holy Table and talked to us about a very difficult subject -- praying "in the hard times."

She imparted much practical advice for how to pray when it is hardest of all to pray, when God seems very distant, when the world seems to be crashing in around us,

She also talked about how to pray to forgive and to be forgiven.

Barbara began by telling us what prayer is not: it cannot be outcome based. We should not be thinking of God "as a powerful genie who will do what we say if we pray properly. We don't order up the results of our prayer like a pizza."

She asked us to think of prayer as a way we enter into and become aware of the kingdom of God, or the dominion of God, or the energy of God that connects all things in the universe, all that there is and ever shall be. She urged us to pray specifically and honestly, but also know that God knows before we ask.

"In prayer, we are not cajoling God or making God change his mind. We are not placating an angry king who has it in for us. We don't think God sends evil into our lives," she said.

"The creative love of God that causes everything continues to reverberate, continues to create," she said. "There is a river that flows from the love of God."

In our prayer, we we enter the river, or more precisely, we become aware of the flowing river we are already in.

When we pray for others we connect to them in profoundly holy way by sharing in God's compassion.  "When we pray, we take people's hand and go in the river with them."

Barbara gave us the benefit of much wisdom Saturday in her gentle and eloquent way. She is also a spell-binding story teller.  I won't presume to give all that we heard to you here -- I am not capable of that, but do come here her preach Sunday if you can (and I would suggest you sign up for her email reflections at The Geranium Farm website by clicking HERE).

She took us deeply into some difficult topics including how to live with our own death. She imparted to us a metaphor that I will summarize for you:

Imagine two baskets, she suggested. One basket sits inside the other. "We live in the smaller basket," and that basket is the universe, all that we know and see.

The smaller basket is our home, and we don't want to leave that basket, but we can see through the weaves to the other basket -- and those are glimpses of what is beyond.

"One day the smaller basket crumbles and we are in the bigger basket. The big basket is also my home."

The bigger basket is the Kingdom of God, and we've always lived in it. "Our first sensation after death is I've always been here. Recognition."

To live now is to live beyond our fear of what comes next and bring it to prayer. "Heaven may be what God intended for us all along here."

Barbara Crafton and her Almost-Daily eMos

Next Saturday we will be graced with the words and presence of Barbara Crafton, who is an author of several books, workshop leader and much more. She will lead us in an Advent retreat day at St. Paul's.  For those who follow her, you know she sends an email every day or two with a reflection or two. She gets to the heart of things in a gentle way. She puts all of her writing on a website called The Geranium Farm.

Her email missives are called the "Almost-Daily eMo." She sent this the other day explaining how it got its name; those of you who write with regularity may also recognize yourself in this. Please join us with Barbara at St. Paul's on Dec. 3 from 9 am to 3 pm (lunch on your own) and she will be preaching the following day.

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WRITING THE EMOS
By Barbara Crafton

In the new living room of a new house on a new street, some things are still the same. The dark of early morning outside the window. The crackle of burning logs. The ancient words of Morning Prayer. The steaming cup of tea. And the expectant page, waiting for words.

All day, every day, ideas appear. Ideas, or fragments of ideas. Some matriculate and some do not: I forget all about them and they never become essays. Many matriculate but never graduate -- my files are full of lonely paragraphs who have yet to become essays. But some of my ideas actually do graduate and find meaningful work -- there they are on the page, the fortunate few who realize their birthright promise.

I can write on assignment -- tell me what you need and I can probably pound out something that will suit. Writing the eMos is different: there is no assignment. I have read that yeast floats through the air, and that if you set out a paste of flour and water you can catch enough of it to leaven a loaf of bread. The eMos are like that: images and ideas float through the air, and some of them germinate.

The extent to which the germination of an essay depends on receiving is a little frightening. You can't sweat your germ of an idea into existence: you can only wait for it to appear. But you can become more skilled at recognizing the spores that will form it -- there are millions of them, and you learn to see them as they swirl toward you. Over time, it takes less and less to prime the pump. A single image, a lone word can be enough. You have grown fertile in your receptivity, easily impregnated with words that become sentences that become paragraphs that become pages. You do parent your writing, even if you do not sire it: this or that decision about this or that adjective, this or that fragment, the stretch for the very word you want -- these things you learn by doing, over and over. And by reading. And by listening to the way real people really talk.

In the early morning dark, by the fire -- this is still where it happens best for me. Music used to be part of my writing process, but I now seem unable to read or write to it. And I notice that my writing is slower-- my brain is showing its age. But that's all right. It'll have to be. We work with the instrument we have, not the one we wish we had.

Every once in a while, somebody writes and asks how the Almost-Daily eMo got its name. "Almost-Daily" speaks for itself, I guess: a hedge against the spottiness of my output. And "eMo"? Parishioners over the years have called me "Mother Crafton". I grew accustomed to it long ago. The abbreviation for "Mother" is "Mo." Kids in my parishes, and many who were not kids, took to calling me "Mo." I liked this, and still do. Anything good enough for the Three Stooges is good enough for me.

So an eMo is an electronic visit with Mo. Crafton. That's all.

Egypt: We pray for God's nearness

Among my favorite writers these days is Barbara Crafton and her almost-daily meditations that she sends to friends (you can read Barbara's work and get a free subscription on her website HERE). She sent this reflection the other day about the events in Egypt and it is well worth the read:

WAITING FOR WORD
By Barbara Crafton

It was too early to turn on the radio -- Q was still asleep. But it was almost noon in Cairo, and I wondered what the news there might be. We fell asleep to two sounds, one very loud and one very quiet: angry Egyptians in the streets, burning cars and facing down riot police. And the careful tiptoeing of diplomats around the situation, the same gingerly response we heard last week in Tunisia. Yemen, too. Algeria. We hear nothing from Saudi Arabia, not yet -- who knows? But it is clear that a region long nicknamed "the powder keg" has, once again, ventured very near the flames. What will happen is anybody's guess.

Americans have a natural inclination toward those who wish to free themselves of despotic rule, a powerful mythology about ourselves and our origins that makes us reflexively sympathetic to them. And yet we know from experience that no revolution in the Middle East will be a copy of our revolution: different heritage, different culture, different lots of things. And this is a different century, for heaven's sake: think of how long it took for news of the difficulties in America to travel across the sea to the Court of St. James. And then think of Twitter.

And so what happens in Egypt or Tunisia might surprise those of us who have failed to give these events more than an approving glance -- and this is why the diplomats tiptoe. Just because both we and a new government in Egypt or Tunisia spring from revolutions does not mean that the newcomers will recognize us as natural allies. Quite the contrary: the new order in these countries may well be distinctly less welcoming to American interests than the old ones. Our old habit of propping up questionable leaders to the detriment of the local scene has backfired on us before, and it could do so again.

I think of the infant Christ, now a month old. Of his parents -- political nobodies, an ordinary couple who just wanted to raise their little boy in peace. Of how troubling it must have been to them when people reacted so strongly to their baby's presence -- when old Simeon broke into song in the temple, when foreign potentates showed up bearing gifts, how horrifying when they heard that other people's babies had been slaughtered for his sake. Yes, yes, I know that the December birthdate of Jesus was probably a later embellishment to the story, and I know that the Slaughter of the Innocents is not attested in any sources save Christian ones. But I am less interested in the journalistic truth of our story than in the story itself: a story of ordinary people caught in the web of world events they did not shape, seeking and finding God's guidance in the midst of them. We are not given a choice as to whether or not to be affected by politics -- like it or not, we will be.

And so I listen to the radio and wonder what will happen -- I, who have no worldly power to change a thing in the Middle East or anywhere else but my most immediate surroundings. And I remember that a Jesus in shackles told a very worldly ruler, one who had the power to put him to death, that his kingdom was not of this world. The categories of justice and power which the world recognizes are not the final word about either justice or power. This world is not the only world there is, nor is this life the only life. In it, we do not always win. Many people find it offensive when someone suggests that the country we love might not win every time, that we might not always be first. But nothing lasts forever. Nobody is first forever. We need not control everything. Indeed, we cannot.

What this means for our prayer about the world is similarly humbling: prayer is not incantation. It does not summon God to our side, a powerful but obedient genie who must do as we ask if we ask in the right way. Or if the right people ask. "God with us" does not mean "God on our side against someone else," as a political alliance with an earthly king would mean. Rather, it is a constant invitation to us to go deeper into what it might really mean to be righteous.

Nations will always act according to their perception of their own interests -- and that usually means their immediate interests, at that. This is the limitation of politics as moral yardstick -- standing alone, it makes a poor one. Righteousness is something different. We do not expect much of it in politics, yet we know that God is not far off from any human activity, and politics is nothing if not human.

And so we pray for God's nearness. And we wait for word.

Barbara will visit us at St. Paul's later this year to lead us in an Advent retreat. Stay tuned for more details as they unfold.

Postscript to the murder of a young friend

Some months ago, I wrote a personal reflection about the death penalty, which you can read by clicking HERE. My reflection was prompted by going to the life imprisonment sentencing in Sacramento on July 1 of two men convicted of murdering a young friend of mine, Jim Arthur in June 2009.

Jim, a student and fledging artist, was only 23. One of the killers, Jonathan Baker, flew into a rage when he learned Jim was gay. Testimony showed that Jim was stabbed 176 times.

Jim was robbed in his mother's home, lured into a trap by a young woman who had befriended him, Nadine Klein, now 21. The jury could not reach verdict in her case, and a mistrial was declared.

Nadine Klein was back on trial this fall, and on Monday the second jury convicted her of first degree murder in the course of a burglary, which carries with it the sentence of life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. You can read the story in The Sacramento Bee by clicking HERE. Monday was also the sixth anniversary of the heart attack that took the life of Jeff Arthur, Jim's dad and my very close friend.

I pray that this nightmare for the Arthur family and my friends will now begin to end. I pray for the families of the murderers that they will find their way out of their own nightmare. I pray that I might learn how to pray for the murderers, for I know not how. And I pray for the jurors in these trials who have endured considerable anguish to carry out their civic duty and who receive no thanks from the public.

The other day, my friend Barbara Crafton wrote this about her recent experience on jury duty in New Jersey where she lives as serves as an Episcopal priest. Although she was not impaneled, I think it a good commentary on why we have juries and why ordinary people like us need to serve on them. Here it is from her "Geranium Farm" website:

JURY DUTY
By Barbara Crafton

I'm here, but I know they won't empanel me. They never do. So I sit in the waiting room with a hundred fellow citizens, and we have just taken our oath of office as jurors, administered by a judge who removed a wad of chewing gum from his mouth, befitting the solemnity of the moment.

As always, I allow myself to imagine myself in that tiny community of people who will hold the fate of another person in their hands. We would be carefully instructed as to what was and what was not our task. Some among us would forget, though, impatient with our constraints, and anoint themselves detectives or self-taught judges. Some would consider this afternoon a chance to "send a message" -- a message not directed at this courtroom or the parties in it at all, perhaps, but intended for a wider audience, one which might exist only in their imagination. Some would be highly intelligent. Some would not be. Some would hate being there. Some would love it.

We would be a jury of peers, for anyone who came before us: a mixed bag of commitment and anxiety, well and poorly equipped for this work. We would be little better or little worse than the people who looked to us for fairness. Most of us will sit here all day and then leave, never having had the chance to present the mixed bag of our service in an actual case. They say we won't be back for three years, but they said that a year ago, too. The last time I was called.

We divide power in here in the United States, forcing a check on any one part of us, insisting on balancing responsibility among us as best we can. Our judges don't work alone. Neither do our presidents or our legislators or our generals. The result may be clumsy affair, but it is ours.

Photo above of Jim Arthur.

Hummingbirds and sharing

This came across the transom the other day from Barbara Crafton and her Geranium Farm website.

We have two hummingbird feeders at our place, and I know of what she speaks. Of course, she is writing about more than just hummingbirds...

SHORT-SIGHTED
By Barbara Crafton

There are three feeders out here, ladies.

I don't think they heard me. Or, more likely, they did hear me and are just tuning me out. Hummingbirds are territorial -- they'd rather fight about the feeders than drink from them. No, it's NOT enough that she stays away from my feeder. I want her out of my YARD! And so they dive-bomb each other without mercy every time one of them tries to feed, and in the end, nobody eats. Hummingbirds preparing for migration need to eat about 11,000 calories a day. These two had better come to terms soon, or they'll be spending the winter in New Jersey.

In appearance they are so unlike us -- so tiny that they'll sometimes come right up to us unafraid, if we're not moving, because they think we're trees, or maybe smallish continents. They can fly backwards -- we can't even fly forwards. They can put themselves in a state of suspended animation if it gets too cold for them. Many of them are irridescent, and hardly any of us are. They may be able to inherit memory from their parents -- some hummers are believed to have found fruitful feeding grounds which their mothers visited repeatedly but to which they themselves had never been.

But in one regard we are just alike: sharing is hard for the members of both species. Often we are willing to go without something we truly want and need, just for the pleasure of depriving someone else of it.

Something primitive in us fears that someone else's good fortune will come at our expense. It is a ancient thing, I guess, born of an ancient jungle reality that bears little resemblance to the reality we actually inhabit: Grab what you can, no matter whose it is. You don't know for sure that you'll have another chance at it. Such grasping is understandable if you're a Pakistani flood survivor and haven't eaten in a week, but it's less so if you're in Metuchen and could stand to lose twenty pounds. Surrounded by more than enough of everything, we nonetheless remain fearful about our hold on anything, so much so that we are willing to sacrifice everybody's longterm good, including our own, for the sake of short-term profit we can pocket right now.

Nowhere is our moral and practical blindness more visible than in the political realm, where short-term self-interest trumps anything remotely resembling truth so frequently that we have all trained ourselves to laugh at it when we see it. Every day we hear them repackaging themselves, repudiating their own past positions, striving to help us see that they never really said what we heard them say last month -- well, that is, they may have said it, but they didn't mean what we thought they meant. What they really meant was what we want to hear. Then they wonder why people hold them in such low esteem. Such transparent self-serving is in the paper every day, of course, but it is far from new -- among our possessions is an 18th/century engraving called "The Politician," in which the subject sits reading, so intent on his newspaper coverage that he fails to notice that the candle he holds is setting his own hat on fire.

Being like the little children

This came across my email the other day from Barbara Crafton in her Almost Daily eMo from GeraniumFarm.org.

While I am somewhat unable to relate to her wardrobe difficulty, I was really taken aback (in a good way) by her comment on Jesus' telling us to become like little children.

Barbara hears a different twist than the usual. Have a read...

FRUSTRATION AND DESIRE

By the Rev. Barbara Crafton

The wrap dress: soft and comfortable but chic and understated. Guaranteed to look fabulous on any woman who wears it, regardless of her shape. Guaranteed by whom, I wondered. But I bought the dress.

I've worn it a few times, but this morning I found myself inexplicably confounded by its rather complex topology. You definitely need to get both waist ties to meet from opposite directions and join in the middle, but somehow they both kept ending up on the same side. There was a belt loop-- for sure, one of them is supposed to go through it. But then its direction is wrong. Why can I not do this today, when I've done it before?

I never did get it right. Feeling like a kindergartener who can't yet tie her shoes and ends up with an ugly knot instead, I found a way to tie it so that at least the dress won't fall off during the day. One hopes. Oy.

The frustration of being unable to master a task is bitter. It takes a brave person to persevere in the face of it. Toddlers are that brave -- they climb steps as high as their hips, struggle mightily to push a chair across the floor that weighs as much as they do. Their drive to learn is greater than their frustration, and it carries them.

I think about Jesus and the little children. Let them come, he said, don't shoo them away. You must become like them, in fact, to enter the household of God. We usually think of their innocence when we hear the story of this exchange, or their vulnerability. But those two are not the only facts of childhood: to those we must add children's endless curiosity, their boundless drive to know things they do not yet know, to try and try to do things they cannot yet do. They are ready to be empowered.

And empowerment never ends. We don't stop learning just because we grow up, unless we confuse God's radical acceptance of us just as we are with our own indolent desire not to grow and change. Just as I am, Christ welcomes me. And fires me, with every weakness I bring, with desire to become what I will be.

Art by Flor Larios

Finding a geranium in the midst of tragedy

My spiritual practice in recent years includes reading an email that comes almost every day from someone I have never met, Barbara Crafton. She is a priest and writer, and her "Almost Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm" often strikes a chord with me at my deepest being (you can sign up for her email missives by clicking HERE).

She sent this one the other day. It is not about Yeardley Love, but it could be. Yeardley was a 4th year student at the University of Virginia who would have been graduating this weekend but was killed allegedly by her ex-boyfriend.

Yesterday I mentioned that many people will be wearing white ribbons at graduation ceremonies to bring attention to the violence against women on college campuses and to honor her.

Her loss is still very raw in our community, and is not far beneath many conversations that I've had with people in recent days.

Meanwhile, in Sacramento, a jury this week has been deliberating on murder charges against three young people accused of killing the young son -- a college student -- of a very dear friend of ours.

Where do we find faith in the midst of tragedies like these? Barbara Crafton's words help me. I offer this in the hope it will help you:

GRADUATIONS AND FUNERALS

Where are the graduates seated? I whispered to the chaplain, once we were in our seats and the ceremony had begun. There were many different groups of people in many different kinds of vestments and I wanted to be sure not to fix my gaze on the wrong group.

He nodded slightly stage left. They're right there. They'll be right in front of you.

Okay, good. Thanks.

They were receiving their degrees, tangible evidence of their having worked hard on a specific set of requirements and succeeded at them. I was receiving a more fanciful one, it seemed to me -- an honorary doctorate bestows academic honors on achievements other than academic ones. I always thought I would earn a doctorate someday, probably, but I never did. I still feel, vaguely, that I ought to have done, and so I was a little embarrassed by my honorary doctorate. It seemed I had no right to it. Still, my diffidence about it, though real enough, was not sufficient to cause me to refuse it on grounds of my undeserving -- I was too flattered to do that.

But there was more in my heart than than just an awkward modesty warring with my pride. The beauty of the day, the beauty of the place, the happiness of the graduates -- it all reminded me painfully of another graduation just a week ago, at which the lovely daughter of my nephew and his wife received a magna cum laude degree in physics from Clemson University. Her hard work, amply rewarded. Happy, proud parents, happy proud grandparents, all smiles in pictures with the graduate. And then, two days later, an atom bomb fell on the family -- Samantha's been in a terrible accident. What do you mean? Where? What happened? How bad is it? What's going on?

Nothing good. Samantha never regained consciousness. That lively intellect, that curious spirit, that amazing girl -- she died with both her parents beside her, praying and holding her hands as she slipped from this world into the next.

All the funeral things. All the casseroles. All the calls. All the photographs. The unaccustomed suit, quickly purchased for her lanky younger brother, who looked so suddenly grown up in it. The surreal bustle of the days immediately following, with people coming and going, some people busy and other people standing around, not knowing what to do with themselves. Airports and taxicabs. Hotel rooms. Flowers. Teenagers and young adults, plunged into something too horrid and absurd for them to countenance. Some of them weeping. Some of them numb. Some of them laughing at a joke and the stopping themselves, their hands to their lips, horrified at themselves for laughing.

Oh, wrong! Injustice! What good is mathematics, anyway, if it can't come to our rescue here, if it can't help us us balance this equation better? Why is it that those of us who have had the chance to live in this glorious world cannot just quietly trade places with those taken from it too soon? Would that be such a terrible thing? I believe that many would volunteer -- I have asked many people this in the last few days, and many said they have thought the same thing. So you see, we have a consensus. I plan it out idly as we drive in the car: imagine the graceful switch, imagine lying down quietly, happy to see the dead return to live out their full term. It seems to me that it would work. It wouldn't be so hard. Why can we not just substitute one for another?

Oh, no reason. Just because.

Oh.

And so I say to myself what I always say. Stay tuned. The dead don't live our lives anymore, but they live something. Some other way we can't know but can sense, sometimes -- only sometimes, though, because we're just not very good at sensing it, not here, where we only partially understand what it means that we live in Christ. In the early days, of course, you sense nothing but the yawning cavity of loss. What other people say about sensing the ongoing life of the dead may just roll off your back, or it may even strike you wrong and make you angry. So I don't always say a lot at first, unless I am asked point blank what I think happens to them. I mostly sit and listen, hold a hand, cry when tears come. Don't say much except in the sermon, if I am preaching at the funeral. Which I was not, not at this one.

I was preaching at a graduation. A graduation of people who, very soon, will be preaching at funerals. How very strange. They didn't know me, and I didn't know them. They didn't know what had just happened, and I didn't tell them, because this service was not about that. I just mentioned, as if in passing, that they would accompany people through their turning points, their graduations and their funerals. Mentioned it as if it were just a priestly thing every priest does. Which it is, of course.

But it is never generic when it happens. No matter who, and no matter when. Each one, from the old man whose death is a blessing to the young girl whose death is a fresh outrage.

Time and freedom

Barbara Crafton maintains a website called The Geranium Farm (click HERE). She is a prolific writer, and she sends an email nearly every day with a reflection. This one came last week, and I am still pondering it. Take your time with this, all the time you need. It is about time.

FLYING INTO YESTERDAY
By Barbara Crafton

Perhaps it's getting to the airport that makes travel tiring. Certainly sitting on a plane while someone else flies it isn't taxing -- at least, it shouldn't be. But flying halfway across the country wears me out. And so does flying for an hour or less. No reason for it, but there it is.

I am wondering it it is the unnaturalness of such speedy traversing of the earth's surface that does this. Maybe we're just not supposed to move so fast. Travel somewhere by sea, and the time zones yield to one another gradually -- you don't arrive somewhere at an earlier hour than the one at which you left home. But you can travel far and fast enough enough from certain places to certain other places to arrive at your destination the day before you set out for it. Maybe that's just not meant to be.

Or maybe it is. I believe that time is an earthly thing. God doesn't have it -- or, rather, God holds time, but is not held by it, as we are. For us, its grip is iron. None of us escape its passing, and the passing of time feels sad to us more often than it feels glad. We mark the passing time time by the things it has taken from us: "Oh, that must have been before my mother died," we say, and we accumulate a wistful string of such markers, more and more of them as life goes on.

It is not so with God. All moments are now in the kingdom of heaven, where all are in Christ and Christ is all in all. All, as in everything: everyone, every time, every place. Everything. You and me: all we are and ever were and ever shall be.

It always surprises me that more people don't grasp what good news this is for us. It's more than an interesting mathmatical puzzle: it's eternal life. We're not trapped here, bleakly and endlessly counting our mounting losses. We -- and they-- are folded into God's now, and this is true right now. That moment you wish you could have again still exists. And so does the one you haven't had yet, the hidden one for which you wait. So do all our yesterdays, and all our tomorrows.

Our current experience is otherwise, of course, except in the odd dream, the mystical moment, the times we spend in "the zone," when we look at the clock in disbelief at how quickly an hour has passed. Mostly what we feel is our bondage to time, not our freedom from it.

But it is the freedom that will last. Not our captivity.

Painting of geraniums by Catherine "Katina" Pastis Radwanski

The Washing of Hands

Barbara Crafton is back from her year in Italy, and she has not missed a beat in her daily meditations from her "Geranium Farm." She sent this one Saturday, meant to go along with today's biblical readings. Have a look, and you can sign up for her "almost daily" emails by clicking HERE. And here is her meditation for today...

The Washing of Hands
By Barbara Crafton

For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it.
-- Mark 7:3-4

Often, people who want our religion to be more logical than it is will maintain that the dietary laws and cleanliness codes of ancient Israel were about sanitation. They try to argue that shellfish were forbidden to the Hebrews because they are dangerous without refrigeration, or that the injunction against boiling a kid in its mother's milk was really a practical response to the problem of unpasteurised dairy products.

This is unlikely. They were a means of maintaining Israel's separateness, not her cleanliness. To this very day, observant Jews and Muslims shape their daily life around their strictures. Most will tell you that they do not find the rules onerous: rather, they find them reassuring. Through them, they connect with the past of their people, and they connect to God through them, as well. Whatever their orgins, rules can help people to be who they are.

So the Israelites' handwashing was not primarily about sanitation. But we do now know, as they could not know then, that simply washing one's hands is one of the largest factors in the prevention of disease. Worldwide, diarrhea kills more children under the age of five than any other cause -- ten million will die of it before the year is over, the vast majority of them in developing countries. Children's bodies are small: it doesn't take long for an infection to overwhelm them. But educating mothers and village leaders in developing countries in very simple practices -- washing hands thoroughly before food preparation, before eating, after using the the toilet. Along with mosquito netting and medicine, Episcopal Relief & Development trains village volunteers to educate each mother in a village in this simple thing -- the washing of hands, to save her children's lives.

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To learn more about ER&D or to make a donation, visit www.er-d.org or telephone 1-800-334-7626, ext 5219.

Remembering and Holy Week soon to come

I am a little late with today's post -- an internet glitch at home. Sorry.

I came across a wonderful gem the other day from Barbara Crafton, who is an Episcopal priest who is currently serving in Florence, Italy. She has a terrific website called the Geranium Farm, and she sends a missive every day or two to folks. This one, I think, is especially fitting for Holy Week coming up, and says something about how we make the ancient story our story, the concept of remembering that we do in our liturgy.

In fact, all liturgy is just that: the recapturing of something that once happened, bringing it alive again and amplifying its meaning in the present moment, where we are now. The endless debate about "what's really happening" in a sacrament is fruitless, by and large: they are not rational occurrences, and they cannot be reduced to reasonable explanation. It is one of the saddest parts of being rational beings, this sterile insistence of ours that everything make sense, our grumpy suspicion of mystery. It cuts us off at the knees. Human beings are more than brains with legs. We are hearts, too. Many things can reach us, through many doors other than the door of our understanding. We owe it to ourselves to open all the doors, and throw open a few windows, too, while we're at it.

Make your ears tingle

Barbara Crafton is an Episcopal priest from New Jersey who spends a lot of time in Italy. She sends out a daily email to her friends called the Geranium Farm, and she maintains a website called GeraniumFarm.org. She is really cool.

Barbara plants a lot of seeds. This one came in this week:

Use The Power You Have

"See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle. "
1 Samuel 3:11

Now, there's a colorful expression. Our ears are tingling right now, in fact, every time we turn on the radio for the latest news from the Holy Land. Where can it end, we ask each other. How much worse can it get? What is the way out?

I don't envy your new president, someone says at dinner, and all the Americans nod soberly. An economy in tatters, war in two countries, and worse news from Gaza every day -- the conflict in Gaza has already cost more than 1,000 lives since December and the fighting continues. Such intractable problems, and so huge. No wonder inaugurations begin and end with prayers.

Those entrusted with the leadership of nations carry a heavy and lonely load --heavier than the one we carry. They also wield more power than we do, of course. But we have the power we have, and all of us -- the great and the ordinary -- have our power for a reason. It's to use for the good. None of us are here for ourselves alone. We are here for each other.

We can't be the ones negotiating a ceasefire, but we can pray for one. We can't be on the ground caring for the wounded or comforting the bereaved or housing, but we can support those who are. Episcopal Relief & Development remains in constant touch with the Bishop of Jerusalem, the Rt. Rev. Suheil S. Dawani and with Al Ahli Hospital central Gaza City. The hospital is now treating more than 50 injured civilians every day. The hospital staff is working around the clock to provide emergency medical care. Recently, the hospital finally received a delivery of desperately needed medicine, supplies, blankets, and food -- the ongoing fighting makes such deliveries difficult and dangerous. Episcopal Relief & Development also continues to send funds to help the hospital meet the rising costs of treating patients.

This is our work. Others carry it out for us, but we fund it through our ER&D donations. It literally cannot happen without us.