The first time my mum decided to take a break from singing in Vancouver’s Christ Church Cathedral Choir, I didn’t think much of it. She had been a faithful servant in their music scene for thirty-five years. It didn’t seem unreasonable to step back for a bit.
And she did return for a while, and then stepped back again, and then returned.
It didn’t happen too many more times, but each time the stepping away was a little longer.
Her friends were confused. Some of them started to ask me questions. I was in the dark.
Finally, one day, I said to her, “Are you done with the choir?â€
“I don’t know,†she said, and shrugged. “Maybe.â€
“How come?â€
“I’m finding it a bit stressful,†she said. “All that music…I can’t really keep it all straight anymore, and then I worry about what the others think. I don’t want them to have to put up with it.â€
She laughed a little.
I just stared.
This was my mum. She had been juggling works like Handel’s Messiah, Vaughn Williams’ Mass in G Minor, and Tallis’s Spem in Alium (a forty-part Renaissance-era motet for eight choirs of five voices each) since before I was born. Since when did she find a few pieces she had sung over and over for years too difficult to manage?
Oh well, I thought. She’s an adult. These things happen as people age, I suppose.
But it wasn’t just that. The things she said about herself, about how she couldn’t keep it together, about how she was a “space cadet,†were coming more and more often. Some of the things she said, always accompanied by that awkward chuckle, were downright cruel.
My mother had always been a titanic figure for me. It was us against the world, and she was, to my eyes, unflappably confident and in control. But over time, I watched this fall away, and while she always seemed happy, she also seemed more anxious, and more forgetful. At first it seemed like any of my other older family members and friends, but it quickly became clear that it was a bit more serious than that.
After lots of convincing from her absolutely inimitable partner, she finally went to the doctor, and some time later invited my spouse and me over to tell us the news: She had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
It was June of 2018.
I couldn’t believe it.
I managed to hold it together, smiling and laughing and planning for the future, until we left. We walked home, and I did so in almost complete silence.
Finally, when I got home, I tried again to hold it together, but couldn’t. I ran to my bedroom, fell upon my bed, and didn’t cry but howled, like a wounded animal. I sobbed so hard that when I emerged to wash my face, I saw I had rings of tiny red dots around my eyes, like the heat rashes I used to get in the summer
What’s worse? I wondered. My dad literally dropping dead with no warning, or watching my mum, without whom I can’t possibly imagine a world, slowly become lost in a thicket of dementia?
There is no answer to such a question, although in some ways this seemed worse. My relationship with my father was complicated. I did not get to resolve it in a way that I wanted before he died, which was very difficult.
My relationship with my mother is imperfect…but, for me, quite uncomplicated.
I love my mum. She is my hero.
Believe it or not, things are, in some ways, much improved. Mum is no longer trying to hide her illness. She is still fairly independent. She and her friends have been traveling and having a ton of parties and visits.
We still giggle and shop for clothes and eat and drink wine.
I have still called her for support during times of uncertainty, just like I always have, to ask her opinion, and she has given it freely.
I remember in those first few horrendous hours thinking, “How can I possibly do this? I love her so much.â€
And later, the beautiful, cruel, and utterly true realization: “You should feel blessed – your love will be what makes it possible.â€
Love makes so much possible – but it never makes anything easy. That has never been a part of the promise.
But then I was introduced by my priest, Peter, to a quote from the 11th century poet Judah Halevi:
“‘Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch.â€
And I remembered that that’s the whole point of a Christian life, for the ability to “love what death can touch†is the very nature of God.
I read this article recently and it brought me back to earlier days when I would lie around devouring comic strip compilations. I loved them: Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, B.C. (my grandfather must have had twelve of those in paperback), and that mainstay of ’90s working women, Cathy.
I was surprised to read that younger women looked at Cathy with such disdain. I always rather liked her.
Going back and re-exploring old strips, I can see where the disdain comes from. Cathy these days does seem pretty dated. She wasn’t exactly a paragon of feminism, although she did try. Her relationship with Irving is probably the most frustrating part of the series. I don’t know much about how people reacted to her marriage to Irving, which occurred in the mid to late 2000s, but it annoys me today. I also find him grating today in a way I didn’t before. Here’s some stuffy emotionally constipated nonsense balanced against man-child phases over sports or other women.
There were plenty of strips where she railed against the fashion industry, or her mother’s tiny dreams for her, but she was regularly crushed under the machinery of the patriarchy, or simply her own insecurity.
Reading it again, I found that I still had some love for her, especially after reading this from Cathy Guisewite’s website. I can’t believe she managed to create a cartoon empire having never actually learned to draw. And I agree with Guisewite that her character has real resilience. As neurotic and messed up as she is, she pushes back against her limitations every single day.
I resonate a lot with that.
Then I read a little further, and damn but if girl can get a real laugh out of me every so often.
TELL ME THAT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN WRITTEN LIKE A WEEK AGO.
The only difference is that you can tell that the reader is meant to empathize with Cathy, not Andrea. Today, there would be 75K retweets from folks who had just changed their avatars to Andrea’s guileless grin.
Don’t you adore the three thousand pounds of ’70s smashing into you through the power of that blonde dude?
There were a few strips like this in the early days when Guisewite was younger and punchier. This one was by far my favourite.
Again, you can see from the art that this was early in her career. Believe it or not, the lusciously coiffed dude on the end of the couch is Irving, he of what I once believed was the perpetual crew cut. The first few strips, actually, involve Cathy trying to get up the guts to tell him what a jerk he is, but of course she never can.
And I feel for her even more in those!
Look at her face in the last panel. She feels Andrea’s rage, but also feels unable to communicate it. And in this way, I think she captures a generation very well, “a generation of women who came of age in a brand new, exciting time for women,” and yet some of whom were Cathys and some of whom were Andreas.
Both Cathy and Andrea have careers, but only Andrea, especially in these early days, seems capable of speaking out about the bullshit she sees around her. Cathy, who shares most of Andrea’s beliefs, is nonetheless having to rebel against everything she has been raised to be with every step she takes.
That’s why the in-depth explorations of her relationship with her mother are so interesting to me. Cathy has resilience and drive and the power of the feminist movement, but the world has shifted and she is forced into a totally new universe where she feels she has to balance her trained civility, innuendo-driven communication, and passive-aggression against a strength borne out of the knowledge that despite how infuriating she finds her mother, Anne is a) a survivor and b) loves her more than life itself.
I see so much of me in Cathy, perpetually struggling against the problematic coping mechanisms she has while trying her best to bust ass all across the kyriarchy.
But I think the real reason I love Cathy is that, when I was growing up, I saw so much of my mum in her.
Cathy gave me a vocabulary for the struggles I saw my mum go through: the perpetual battle to maintain a desirable weight, the pressure to work twice as hard as the men around her to impress half as much, the search for a life partner (although my mum was never as needy or desperate as Cathy), and the strong feminine bonds with friends which were mostly based on sharing complaints about any of the above challenges.
Like Cathy, my mum was a working dynamo, overachieving morning, noon, and night to be seen and recognized. Neither of my parents grew up with much money, so when they divorced my mum knew it was up to her to pull us through (since my dad, God rest his beloved soul, really wasn’t good with money). She’s always been ambitious, but there is so much of my childhood that, when I look back on it, was the way it was because my mum was determined that I would never have any need to worry. She was incredibly warm and accepting, and yet a real task-master when she put her mind to it. She was also determined that I would be the first in the family to go to university, and was adamant that I pursue the degree that I wanted even if it seemed “fluffy,” because education was its own reward. When I decided to take what felt like the ludicrous steps toward a Masters of Divinity, she gave me, with no questions asked, four hundred dollars to supplement what I scraped together for the year before I could qualify for work study and bursary assistance. She never stopped encouraging me to continue with school; I often joke that when I came to her with my master’s degree in hand, she said, “So…PhD?” (It’s not really a joke).
Unlike Cathy’s mother Anne, my mum has never pressured me to marry or have children. She adores my husband and I do know the latter would make her very happy, but she has always only wanted my own happiness. It was clear that, even when she was driving me crazy, a good and happy life for her child was her ultimate intent. I always trusted her wholeheartedly.
That, too, I see in Cathy and Anne’s relationship.
So here’s to you, Cathy, even though you married a schmuck. You finally got what you wanted from the start, and that’s something to cheer for.
This is the second and final installment of my first set of writings on my journey to ordination. Part I can be found here.
PART II: AW HELL NO
As my heart soaked in music, my soul became refined like ore by the liturgy of the church. The rhythm was always the same. It lulled me, knowing what would happen next, felt safe and warm like an old winter coat.
When I returned to church after a few years of spiritual wandering, it was so easy to put that coat on again. But now, growing out of the earth laid there by my environment, my mother, and my childhood, there grew seedlings of my own understanding, new wisdom gained through the everyday struggles of a privileged life.
I rediscovered God after a difficult period of loneliness, bullying, and great uncertainty, appropriately enough in the beautiful city of Norwich, the home of St. Julian, mystic and anchoress, the first woman to write a book in the English language. Julian wrote rhapsodically about a God in whom there was no wrath or malice, and a mother Christ who nursed us with the milk of the Eucharist.
It was here, in the midst of my sorrow and terror, that I was gathered up into an embrace that my body and soul remembered but my mind had long forgotten. In the glow of my own revelation of divine love, I realized that my whole life would not be enough gift to thank the one who rescued me…but it would be more than accepted by Her. It would indeed be treasured.
As I matured in my newfound faith, I discovered that I wanted to share this amazing reality with others, for it was not only for me. All around me were people not only searching for meaning, but who had encountered a hostile church, one that robbed them of their humanity, which bullied them just as I had once been bullied, as a child and an adult.
I had never known that kind of church, and it filled me with sorrow and rage that something I had found to be such a sanctuary could turn around and defile the glory of a human being fully alive. It became imperative that I do as much as I could to show people a different way – not just of church, but of Christianity. It became imperative to demonstrate that this kind of Christianity was not something I had just made up. It was shared by many. It had a history.
One beautiful summer day, as I was walking home, I had a conversation with myself about how I could possibly serve such a glorious God. Ideas came and went, until I laughed inwardly.
Oh, what – you want to be a priest now?
A long long long inner silence followed.
Then, a voice which was inside me and yet outside as well:
Why not?
And another long silence.
Which I’ll fully admit was succeeded by Aw HELL no.
That was the beginning.
The space between that first question and the moment when the Bishop and my colleagues laid hands on me was ten years.
A lot of people are quite surprised when I say this. Others almost appear relieved. Yes, there is much wandering required. Also, pain and suffering.
And great joy.
Certainty, which I believe to be the true opposite of faith, should be rare. Unwavering confidence should be rarer. Rarest of all should be the idea of that holy hands-on moment as a prize to be won.
It is no prize. It is no reward, no treasure, no triumph.
It is something beyond description, something I only received through tears and terror and “sweat like great drops of blood.â€
Some argue that it brings about an ontological change; some say that whole notion is self-important folly.
I have Anglo-Catholic sensibilities, so I happen to agree there is an ontological change in a person when they have been ordained. But it doesn’t make them better than anyone else. The Christian heart finds itself drowned in baptism and scored with fire in confirmation, and every Christian is called to struggle and pray for the kingdom to come, for when the kingdom comes fully there will be no need of clergy or institution or boundary between us, for all will sing the song of Love made incarnate and crowned emperor and, like Jeremiah writes, no longer will we need to be taught to know that Love.
But until the kingdom comes, we are all divided. We are divided by a society that lays claim to us depending on how we look, how we identify, who we love. We are in exile by our own hand, which seeks to grasp and dominate. We are in bondage to fear and avarice and arrogance. We need teachers and pastors who are willing to give themselves over to the institution, as flawed as it may be. We need lighthouse keepers to remind us of the promises we have been given while the world around us does its best to dampen those promises out of fear or jealousy. We need those who are called to a different sort of exile, what one might call a holy irrelevance, at its very best a port in a storm calling out that Love never changes.
There’s more: in the world we’re living in, Christianity has become more colonized by greed and power than I think it ever has before. I believe in my heart that this is because it recognizes that it is losing the influence it once had. It’s still wholly privileged, but that privilege is beginning to fade. And in the fear that that loss occasions, it is clinging desperately to its power.
This was never Jesus’s intent.
We were never meant to cling to this kind of power.
Those of us who are called to priesthood are called to be tradition-keepers, scholars, storytellers. We are called to always be interpreting the world through the lens of that history, and indeed speaking the needs of the world back into the church. We have to live into the diaconal role we once inhabited that still dwells within us. We cannot be silo’ed off from the world.
This is what I feel most called to do. I have never seen myself as a parish priest, which is probably why the road was so long to get to that moment where the hands came down.
I’m not sure exactly how to end this long series of strange thoughts.
Perhaps in the end, there is no real end at all.
I am only one small light in a long torch-lit hall toward the banquet.
Jesus said, ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.’
John 16:12-15
You ever stop and think that God might be a little queer?
I’ll quickly note that I know it’s not the most comfortable term for everyone. It’s not got a fantastic history. But I prefer it for myself as a bi person, and it’s inclusive of so much and easier to say than the alphabet soup string of letters that often gets used instead.
I think God’s a little queer.
Me & Sister Petunia at St. Paul’s Pride Day High Tea, 2017
God’s love is just so expansive and intimate and over the top. It can’t be easily defined. It’s for everything and everyone. God loves you parentally, platonically, romantically, relationally, and in a million other ways. God is like a parent, nurturing and guiding us, teaching us to walk and to love. God is like a friend who knows and cares for us so deeply in all of our individuality. God is like a lover who yearns for us, always seeking deeper intimacy out of sheer desire and delight. God is like a sibling who has walked among us and knows our struggles.
There’s no nailing down what kind of love this is. It’s so much bigger than biology, so much bigger than a house with a picket fence and the Cleavers and a dog, so much bigger than all of the other family units that have existed alongside and outside that one. It can’t be contained and the traditional models may be helpful but are not sufficient for its full understanding and expression.
God’s a little queer!
A confession: I used that metaphor to prime the pump. We’re going out a little further, because our beloved is even bigger than that.
I think God’s a little transgender!
We’ve been gifted a beautiful new framework in the world we’re living in today to explore that most complicated of remembrances: Trinity Sunday. We tie ourselves up in so many knots over what it could possibly mean to worship a God who is three but also one. At the ordinations yesterday, Archbishop Melissa told us that Augustine once said that to not believe in the Trinity is to lose one’s soul…but to contemplate it is to lose one’s mind!
I’ve preached on today’s passages before, and I decided to go back and see what I said last time, and man, I don’t think even I know now what I was trying to communicate then.
But in the last couple of years I have been so deeply blessed to receive a vocabulary, a deeper understanding, of something I have been struggling to express my whole life.
What if you’re not pink OR blue? What if you’re kind of violet? What if you’re something else entirely? What if you’re handed this binary system of female and male as a little kid, and it just snaps in your hands and you panic, and you spend more than half of your life thinking, “Ohhh I can’t believe I broke it!†and then all of sudden, you realize it was a questionable system from the get-go and in fact it wasn’t God that handed it to you because God was busy doing other stuff like making beautiful sea creatures that don’t even have a biological sex much less a gender?
And then, suddenly, you come to church on Trinity Sunday and you realize, “Wait – one God in three persons, undivided…that sounds a little trans, a little nonbinary,†and then you think, “God is so cool,†and THEN and then you think, “The church is so cool for figuring this out like 1500 years ago!â€
This may sound fanciful, but it’s actually on the forefront of queer theology to reconsider our God in these terms. And it’s not as if there wasn’t some pretty fanciful stuff happening all throughout the church from the very beginning.
God, a being outside of gender who is described with archetypal images of both genders (warrior king, mother hen), and who ultimately chooses a gendered expression to reach us more closely. Jesus, transcending straight-forward male presentation with countercultural actions like footwashing and a divinity within. The Holy Spirit, so trans she eschews a body altogether only to rest upon us at times, indwelling our bodies when she is invited.
And throughout the history of the church, there were many theologies and images outside the binary system we’ve idolized in these later years. The ancient Greeks of St. Paul’s time believed that your physical behaviour could actually affect your biological sex! And for years theologians and mystics, no matter their gender, referred to and understood all human souls as female. St. John of the Cross, a Spanish contemporary of Teresa of Avila, describes his own soul this way in his masterwork “The Dark Night of the Soul†– and if you think, “Well, the soul is never explicitly named as female in that poem,†you’ve got to come to grips with the fact that the alternative is that John’s male soul was sneaking off to a romantic tryst with a male Christ!
No matter which way you slice it, God’s a little queer!
You’ve got to think that God must be at least as diverse as we are.
Imagine how we’ll be imagining God in a few more decades. “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.â€
Now of course the church is made up of a patchwork quilt of people of all colours, creeds, nations, genders, and orientations. I suppose you could just as easily say the church herself is a little trans! But a Trinitarian God is not merely a God who presents differently. Gender and orientation is just one piece of who we are as people and as Christians.
No, a Trinitarian God also acts differently than we might expect.
A standard assumption about a divine being might be certain characteristics like remoteness, timelessness, omnipotence, omniscience.
A Trinity is, by its nature, invitatory. It is always in the process of inviting.
Here in the West, we often get caught up in the confusing whirlpool of “being†and “substance.†We ask ourselves what it means to be three-in-one and one-in-three. But in the Eastern Orthodox traditions, there is more of a focus on a sort of movement, on action. The Greek word perichoresis is used to describe a sort of dance that occurs between each person of the Trinity. If you think of three people holding hands and dancing in a circle, you will see each one has its distinctions, but joined together they are also one thing, a new thing, woven together.
I think in the world we’re living in today, this is a more helpful way to contemplate the Trinity, a way that has so much to teach us in a comparatively lonely city and a comparatively lonely time.
You can see this reflected in Scripture as we heard the beautiful words of Proverbs, describing to us Lady Wisdom calling in the streets for all to join her. She’s not going up to individuals and inviting them personally. Her invitation is total and unrestrained. She doesn’t care who comes to eat with her! Doesn’t matter if you brought your tux. Doesn’t matter if your plus one is same or opposite gender. Doesn’t matter how old you are or if you expected to be invited to dinner tonight. You’re welcome, if you heed the call.
And indeed this is simply another outpouring of her delight at the beginning of creation, laughing to watch the cosmos being spun, beside God like a master-worker.
From the beginning, from first light to the cross to the brand new light of today and ever after, this Triune God unfolds a tapestry of every colour to adorn the whole earth, and the only intent in doing so is to invite all creation to take part in the dance.
Beloved, the Spirit of truth is here, and calls us at the gates – calls us to keep her way of open arms, unfettered hospitality, and bold delight.
You will know her by her fruits: joy, peace, love, compassion, and hope.
This is my first series of posts on my ordination journey. It is likely not the only time I will write on my story of faith or the journey I made toward becoming a priest. These were preliminary thoughts.
PART I: FOR THE MUSIC
My hands wound themselves together into a wild bird’s nest of uncertainty.
Dean Peter Elliott, my priest, waited patiently.
Finally I said, with a giggle, “You can tear up that paper I gave you last time. The one with the five year plan on it?â€
“Oh?â€
“Yeah. I’m not sure what to do now.â€
Somewhere in the forests of trinkets from my childhood is a photocopied and stapled sheaf of papers. This is the “yearbook†that my sixth grade teacher put together for our class. Neat rows of black and white photographs line the pages, with short blurbs beside them.
My picture is…not great. I had protested that I hated photos of myself, and when I was asked why I said, “I smile weird.†Whoever took the photo then said, “What do you mean? What does it look like?†I widened my eyes and twisted my lips into a clownish close-lipped smile…and heard a sneaky click.
The blurb next to the photo says I want to be a poet.
Fast forward twenty years and you’ll find another photo on my Facebook page.
In this one, you can’t see my face. The white sleeve of an alb is in the way. Archbishop Melissa Skelton, the first female bishop of the Diocese of New Westminster, has her hands on my head.
Behind me is a sea of clergy in white, with their hands on my shoulders or on the shoulders of the people in front of them.
Whatever strange molecules work the magic of ordination must travel like electricity.
There had never been any indication that my life would turn out this way.
My earliest memories are mostly related to church and music.
Whenever someone asked Mum about her faith, she would mutter, “Oh, I just go to church for the music.†And through the ‘80s and ‘90s that was mostly true, although as I began to learn more about my family history I started to question those long-ago denials. Great-grandpa was a missionary and abolitionist. My grandfather was a church organist for ten years. The importance of faith ran deep in my family. Mum’s demurrals ring hollow even now – she could have signed up to sing with a secular choir like Phoenix or Electra. But no, it was always choirs that focused on sacred music, because that’s what she loved. It’s what spoke to her.
I would watch Mum sit back in her chair as she listened to Chanticleer or The Tallis Scholars and close her eyes, letting it wash over her. I remember thinking, “This must be very profound.†And so I too would listen, absorbing Renaissance polyphony and simple plainsong and the intricate Celtic knotwork of English choral Matins and Evensong tones. Mum would take me to rehearsals for different groups with a bag of toys and books and leave me in a corner to myself. I crafted complicated narratives with plastic ponies and dinosaurs, all the while subconsciously breathing in the glory of Palestrina, Byrd, Vaughn Williams, Bach, Handel, Gabrieli, Willan. At that time, Christ Church Cathedral had no children’s programing, and so there was nothing holding me back from soaking up the sacred fumes all around me.
When we moved to Ottawa when I was eight, we joined St. Matthew’s Church in the Glebe, which had a brand new Women and Girls’ choir. The Men and Boys’ choir was a long-established tradition here where Anglicanism was more entrenched than on the secular west coast. This was a place where, when I told church people my godfather was Patrick Wedd, they would gasp in admiration.
I entered into a strange new world of blue and purple robes, white neck ruffles and surplices, and silver “Head Chorister†pendants; a world of Responses and Psalm pointing; a world of passing notes and braiding the long multi-coloured streamers attached to hymnal bookmarks during the sermon; a world of my mum cranking the volume on Handel’s Messiah in the car so we could sing along as we drove to Montreal most weekends, where Mum would sing in my Uncle Paddy’s choir, Musica Orbium Acceuil.
When we weren’t at St. Matthew’s or in Montreal, my mum brought me to St. Barnabas, an in-the-rafters high Anglo-Catholic church. In my memory the smell of incense is perpetual and the lights are always low. They did not have a children’s choir, and so there I was allowed to let the music cover me like a blanket.
Music was an easy conduit to the divine. There was never a struggle in my search for profundity. It was easily accessible.
Jesus was friendly, and God was vast. And that seemed okay.
This homily was preached at St. Mary’s Senior’s Eucharist, which occurs semi-quarterly. Residents of the care home where I serve as chaplain are always welcomed by the St. Mary’s community along with residents of other care homes and shut-ins, and included in the service and the wonderful tea served afterward.
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’ 12All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’
Acts 2:1-12
Two years ago, I had the great privilege of traveling to the Holy Land with a group of students and clergy in their first five years of ordained ministry. We stayed at St. George’s College, the Anglican Cathedral in East Jerusalem. Our group was diverse – a third of us carefully selected from the global South: English, Americans, Canadians, Sri Lankans, Africans, New Zealanders, Australians, and Filipinos. The staff of the college was similarly diverse.
Every day, we and several staff members at the small college would gather for Morning and Evening prayer, and often we would gather in the small stone chapel. One evening, however, we gathered in the Cathedral itself, a beautiful old-fashioned Gothic building with great acoustics, dark wood paneling, and a lot of stone and marble.
As we gathered, my friend Ernest stood before us to teach us a Tanzanian song from his homeland. I still remember how it goes:
Hakuna mungu kama wewe
Hakuna mungu kama we
Hakuna mungu kama wewe
Hakuna na hatakuwepo
It means, “There’s no one, no one like Jesus / There’s no one, no one like him.â€
Susan, the associate dean of the college, had officiated that night, and was dressed in full black cassock. She had spent three years living alongside these three, and remembered the song well. All three of them started to dance as we sang, big smiles on their faces.
I remember thinking, as I stood in this English style church in the Middle East, watched this white American dancing with black Tanzanians, and sang a Swahili song alongside folks from nine different countries, that this was the best of the Anglican experience, and indeed the best of the church. No matter who or where we were, we could come together to worship.
And indeed, this is the true experience of Pentecost.
The Holy Spirit is about the business of blowing down doors, making fuel of our old assumptions, and setting our hearts ablaze. She is about drawing us in, no matter our colour, no matter our language, no matter our gender, no matter our orientation or ability – she wants us to be a part of the world God is creating.
Where Jesus gathered his disciples together in one small room and gifted them the Holy Spirit, telling them to love one another, the Holy Spirit blew open the doors to spread out across the world, far and wide, letting nothing stand in her way.
So too have we been drawn together today, from so many languages, peoples, and nations, to praise the one who breaks the darkness with a liberating light.
So too are we called to go out into the world, crowned with fire, witnessing to the beauty, joy, and love we see springing up all around us.
It is a simple thing – but it is the most important thing.
Last night, Peter Elliott (dean of Christ Church Cathedral and the man who will always be my priest) phoned to tell me that Patrick Wedd had died.
Patrick Wedd was a truly brilliant Canadian composer, organist, and choir director.
Source: Musica Orbium website
He was also my godfather.
A lot of folks from outside the church who might be considered “culturally Christian” have a lot of ideas about what a godparent is. Patrick Wedd was all of those things, but more importantly he was everything a godparent is truly expected to be by the church and family that ordains them to such a position.
When my mother was barely an adult (maybe 18, surely no older than 20), her home parish choir director, Peter Chapel, told her she needed to expand her horizons as a choral singer. She needed to join a bigger, more prestigious choir, he said, and he recommended Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Vancouver. “Go and sing for Patrick,” he said. “You must.”
Mum was terrified. She thought there was no possible way she could hack it…but she decided to give it a shot. So began a forty-year long friendship with Patrick and his husband Robert Wells (my other godfather).
There are two gay couples in my life who were instrumental in teaching me as a child that love was love, no matter who you were. Patrick and Rob were one of those couples. From infancy, to me they were Uncle Paddy and Uncle Robbie.
Their relationship was simply gospel when I was growing up. Where there was one, there was the other. To me they always seemed beautifully complementary. Patrick was well known across the Canadian choral world, and a truly accomplished musician in his own right. Rob was quieter, also a wonderful musician, but in my memory more in the background, and always full of smiles. They were so well-matched.
Uncle Paddy always had an air of busy-ness about him to me. There were things to do, minds to mold, worlds to conquer, divine truths to immortalize in music. He is one of two people in my life who always called me by my full, baptismal name: Clare Elisabeth.
Patrick was director of music and organist at the Vancouver Cathedral until the ’80s, when he was succeeded by Rupert Lang, another titanic musical figure in my life. Patrick went on to Montreal after that to work at the church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, and finally, in 1996, he went on to Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal.
He founded many other groups, including Musica Orbium Acceuil, for which my mum sang for years when we lived in Ottawa. Nearly every weekend, the two of us would pile into the car and put one of three CDs into the deck: The Lion King soundtrack, The Mission soundtrack, or Handel’s Messiah. Then, singing all the way, we would make the two hour drive to Montreal for the weekend. I was around nine or ten at the time.
The rehearsals happened in halls and churches, and my mum would load a bag full of books and toys for me. I would go off by myself in a corner and do my quiet thing, soaking up all of this divine music. I also remember checking tickets at one of their shows.
In the evening, we would go back to their little apartment in Montreal, have some manner of delectable dinner, sit in their back porch garden, play with their dog. They had so many weird and wonderful things – books, knickknacks, all kinds of stuff.
When we moved back, although I didn’t see him as often as I once had, the connection was still there. He was invited to my wedding, of course, and I insisted that he play Widor’s Toccata from his fifth symphony in F. As a child, I had learned that the informal name many organists gave to this piece was “Cat and Mouse,” which delighted me. Patrick made that organ walk and talk that day. When my husband Paul and I recessed to it, Paul insisted we not exit the church. He wanted to stand in the narthex, right beneath the organ, so he could hear the whole thing.
He still talks about it.
Despite an entire lifetime of good memories, I still think my best one was the last time I remember seeing Patrick, on the day of my ordination to the transitional diaconate.
I was so nervous I was practically jumping out of my skin as we ascended the stairs to process into St. Mary’s Kerrisdale for the liturgy. And as I walked, I came face-to-face with a pale mustard-yellow shirt and a tie with huge pink peonies on it as someone came dashing into the church at the last minute.
“What a great tie,” I thought, and then I looked up and saw a round beloved face, pink with the heat of the day.
Mum and he had arranged for him to be there but had kept it from me. I was completely taken by surprise. It was such an incredible gift.
Earlier, I said Patrick embodied everything it meant to be a true godfather.
A godparent is not just a family friend with whom you would trust your children. A godparent in these latter days of Christianity is someone with whom you trust the Christian spiritual development of your child.
Patrick was all of that and more to me. While the culture around us and the church itself had high-minded debates about the appropriateness of the inclusion of LGBTQ+ folks, Patrick and Rob did ministry with a capital M, heedless of what the system said was allowed.
For so much of my childhood, the Anglican choral world in Canada was (and often still is) a haven for gay men in particular to give glory to God through music, and especially the crowning gift of the human voice.
Patrick exemplified the kind of persistent dedication that all Christian people should aspire to, the kind of service that just gets done, because someone needs to do it, and because some are called and must respond to the call.
He showed me that it didn’t matter what anyone said: queer people were doing God’s work, whether they were out or not, and to say they couldn’t or shouldn’t was simply a bald-faced lie.
He also modeled for me the truly Anglican love of beauty which has informed so much of my faith. Again, while so many of my family in Christ debate the “appropriateness” of liturgy or aesthetics in worship, Patrick simply lived into the truth of our denominational calling: that worship should be beautiful, because God is beautiful, and because we should always bring our best to God. It instilled in me a passion for musical excellence and liturgical sensitivity. While over time I have exchanged a frankly snobby musical attitude with a passion for sincerity in church music above technical skill, I yet fall into what my Sufi friends might call holy drunkenness when I hear a perfectly executed anthem by a traditional Anglican choir.
There’s not much more to say at this point. My mother wept herself hoarse last night. She couldn’t even speak to me when I phoned her. I was scheduled to officiate at Compline at the Cathedral, so I went there, wondering if I’d make it through the liturgy without making a fool of myself.
I arrived to see a quartet was scheduled. Most of them already knew Patrick had gone home to glory. They sang several of his pieces that night. I read Gerard Manley Hopkins “God’s Grandeur,” one of my favourite options in the Cathedral’s selection. Parts of that poem feel like a protest, like a Magnificat to me. And Uncle Paddy would have liked it.
Today, I am about to leave to practice Rupert Lang’s “Cantate Domino” with Vancouver Children’s Choir alumni for the choir’s 35th anniversary concert. It seems appropriate.
Today, my mother is doing her best to write down all of her memories of Patrick. I can tell she’s not entirely sure why, except that she doesn’t want to forget. There is so much she remembers that I will not, so I’m very grateful.
My commission to you is this: Whoever in your life has been God for you, whoever has modeled what you find is true, honourable, and lovely, if they are still here on earth – please hug them. And if they have passed into the world beyond our sight, maybe think about them, and give thanks.
At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’ Jesus answered, ‘I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.’
John 10:22-30
Last week, two very bright lights of the Christian theological world went out to be lit anew in glory: Rachel Held Evans and Jean Vanier.
The story of their lives, and deaths, could not be more different. Jean Vanier died at age 90 after an impressive forty-year legacy of work and care. Rachel Held Evans, a prominent and luminous Christian writer, died suddenly at age 37 after a bad reaction to medication for an infection.
While we will dearly miss the generous-hearted presence of Jean Vanier, I was surprised by how much Rachel’s death affected me. I am not terribly versed on her body of work, although I had read some articles and interviews and followed her on Twitter, where she was quite active. She alternated between personal vulnerability and fierce advocacy for those commonly marginalized by the church, including women, LGBTQ+ folks, and Christians of colour.
Despite the fog that accompanies the loss of such great witnesses, it seems most appropriate to have before us Good Shepherd Sunday to give some context to our grief.
Rachel Held Evans, born in Alabama in 1981, studied English literature before becoming a journalist in Ohio. Her first book, formerly known as Evolving in Monkey Town and rereleased as Faith Unraveled, explores the implications of the Scopes Monkey trial and Rachel’s acceptance of a new kind of Christian faith which accepts doubt and questioning. She wrote several other bestsellers including A Year of Biblical Womanhood and Searching for Sunday, as well as many articles critiquing the church’s approach on appealing to Millennials, particularly their focus on style over substance of worship. In her Atlantic article “Rachel Held Evans: Hero to Christian Misfits,†Emma Green writes, “Her very public, vulnerable exploration of a faith forged in doubt empowered a ragtag band of writers, pastors, and teachers to claim their rightful place as Christians. Evans spent her life trying to follow an itinerant preacher and carpenter, who also hung out with rejects and oddballs. In death, as that preacher once promised, she will be known by her fruits.â€
Both of these two luminaries not only lived lives of great self-growth and enrichment, but were generous with their wisdom, allowing and empowering others to walk beside them on the way, just as our Good Shepherd does for us.
It’s too bad we don’t get a wider slice of Jesus’s Good Shepherd discourse this Sunday. We only get the more problematic passage which seems to set him against the Jewish people. Location is important for our understanding here. It is significant that Jesus walks in the portico of Solomon at the festival of the Dedication, the feast of Hanukkah. This ties him to the history of his own people, a history of a glorious temple destroyed by an occupying power, and to a stubbornly remembered day of miraculous and enduring light – a light like Jean’s, like Rachel’s. Those who found Jesus walking there would have been full of righteous fire, hungry for imminent justice. “Tell us,†they say. “Tell us, because time is short and we yearn to be wholly God’s again. Tell us you’re the one who stomps down this empire and avenges our oppression.â€
Today as well, we turn to Jesus and say, “Hey, are you going to step up and save us? Are you going to come back to strike down the violent and lift up the oppressed like you promised? Are you even there?â€
John’s Jesus is impatient. He says, “I’ve already told you. You refuse to see it.â€
I think if Jesus were answering us today, he might be more understanding. Earlier Christians believed he would be back soon to fulfill all he had promised. Today, though, we’ve been waiting a while.
He might use similar words – “I’ve already told you†– but I imagine him sounding more like he did lifting Peter out of the ocean. “Why do you doubt? I promised.â€
Jean and Rachel both embodied the kind of enduring faith and humility Jesus demands and models.
By refusing to give up on those whom society had rejected, Jean Vanier lived a life centered around the special witness of developmentally disabled people.
By refusing to cast out those branded as heretics, and also refusing to give up on the Church, Rachel Held Evans lived a life of openness and vulnerability, and sought to model that for anyone unwilling to give up on the church even if it had the temerity to reject them as unredeemable.
Shepherding is not what one would call glamourous work, but like many un-glamourous jobs, the beauty is in the unselfish depths of care that are required. It’s messy, back-breaking, and incredibly isolated. Shepherds of Jesus’s time spent long lonely hours on hills with no-one around but their flock, sometimes not seeing another person for days. And yet this time not only helped remind them of their closeness to creation, but gave them ample opportunity to remember the God who provided for them. The poetry of St. Patrick, who cared for sheep as a slave in Ireland, is a testament to this.
Jean once said, “We are not called by God to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things with extraordinary love.†On the surface, he founded a new community for people to live together, one of the most elementary things for a human being to do. But the mission of that community and his continued presence among them as comrade, or indeed, as family, rather than benevolent overseer, testifies to his status as an imitator of our good shepherd.
Rachel wrote in her book Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again: “Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved.†She spent much of her career giving Christian people an alternative to a narrow-minded reading of Scripture, and listening deeply to those who sought to speak with her in good faith. Again, Emma Green writes, “Especially for people who have felt hurt by or unwelcome in the Church, Evans provided a safe shore, full of encouragement and defiant acceptance.†Her patience with the vulnerable, her defiance against the abusive, and her steadfast faithfulness to the all-loving God she had come to know through her own joyfully owned fragility testifies to her status as an imitator of our good shepherd.
Beloved, as these newly crowned saints do, so should we. Let us not be afraid of our own fragilities. Let us be both a trusting flock of Christ, and a faithful, patient, and fierce tender of lambs.
For as Jean said, “Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness.â€
And as Rachel said, “There are still prophets in our midst. There are still dragons and beasts. It might not look like it, but the Resistance is winning. The light is breaking through. So listen to the weirdos. Listen to the voices crying from the wilderness. They are pointing us to a new King and a better kingdom.”
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ 20After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ 22When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. 23If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’
But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’
A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ 27Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ 28Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ 29Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
John 20:19-31
The German Medieval mystic, polymath, and saint, Hildegard von Bingen, once wrote,
‘Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honour. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. Thus am I ‘“A feather on the breath of God.â€â€™
It’s a lovely image, isn’t it, so deeply layered – guilded columns, kingly robes, and a tiny, vulnerably fluffy thing hovering, perhaps in a golden bar of sunlight, a smile on a royal face.
This quote came into my head a week ago as I observed Holy Saturday with a group of Inayati Sufis.
Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam whose most famous ritual is whirling, spinning around and around as an act of ecstatic prayer, which Sufis can do for long periods of time without getting dizzy or falling down.
There are many branches on the Sufi tree, and the Inayati Order is a modern one, established by Inayat Khan, an Indian dervish and teacher trained up in the much older Chishti Order. Khan felt called to unite East and West in the Sufi tradition, and so he went to the United States, adapting the rituals as he went.
The group I associate with was introduced to me by Seemi Ghazi, a professor at UBC who came to do a clergy professional development day on Islam. I had encountered whirling before and was so moved by it that I asked her if there was a way for someone like me to participate without compromising my faith or being disrespectful of hers.
She laughed. “Muslims love Jesus and Mary too. Come join us.â€
I went to my first Friday zhikr and fell in love with the prolonged free-form chanting of that service. Before we began, I was taught the basics of whirling. Somehow, despite my fear of dizziness, nausea, and falling, the first time I did it with them I managed to do so for almost ten uninterrupted minutes.
Whirling is all about letting go. My assumption, like most people’s, was that the trick lay in resting your gaze on one spot in the distance to steady you. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Sufis do not do this – in fact, most of them whirl with their eyes closed! Some Sufis focus on the thumbnail of the leading hand, and some simply “soften†their gaze, resting on the feeling of solidity between the spinning foot and the ground, like a tree rooted deeply in the earth. The body itself is straight up and down, like the number one, a sacred number for Muslims, who are radical monotheists. As they whirl, they often sing ecstatically, “La illaha illallah,†“There is no God but God.â€
A few weeks ago I was asked to help plan and play harp at a Holy Saturday Yalova sema, or informal whirling service, at the prayer space a dervish couple had built in their basement. This was a small room with many angles and a skylight in the top. The wood is highly polished and the acoustics are incredible.
Eventually I left the harp to join the whirlers in the very small space. My as yet unskilled whirling is relatively slow, but as I continued and my arms opened up into the standard posture of prayer – one pointed to heaven, one pointed to earth, for divine power to run through the body – I felt myself wanting to go faster and faster, like I wouldn’t be able to stop myself, a feather hovering dizzyingly on the breath of God.
I held it in, because I knew that if I tried, I would probably fall over and take a couple folks down with me!
Later, I confessed to another dervish that I had felt myself almost surrender to that impulse. She chuckled and said, “Your heart did.â€
The disciples watched Jesus topple pillars of reality, rip up the roots of their assumptions, and send them whirling into a new way of being. He made sacred abundance from profane elements, unraveled old understandings of royalty, knit them up into new tapestries of vulnerable grace, shattered even the hardest stone tablets of truth like death in the story of Lazarus. With countless deep breaths Jesus sent them spiraling up to hover in sun-kissed flight – feathers on the breath of God.
Then, one horrible Friday, the breath disappeared.
The feather is pulled back to the earth by the weight of its calamus and plummets. The world intrudes upon ecstasy with hard truth, a hard “No†again.
No, death is always the end.
No, liberation is only won through violence.
No, strength comes from a closed fist, it can’t come from a hand pierced with a nail.
No, kings are never crucified.
You were wrong.
You don’t come back easily from a hard fall like that.
And yet.
Three days later, one feather, somehow, finds herself again borne up, and her song manages to pierce through the doubt and failure and fear…and then, suddenly, the breath returns, and despite all horror it breathes peace, peace, peace, and they are all propelled back up into the stratosphere.
All but one…and it ain’t gonna fall again, thank you very much.
I have so much sympathy for Thomas. He was a faithful thinker, one who pondered and loved deeply. He was prepared to die with Jesus visiting Lazarus in Bethany despite the threat of stoning. At the Last Supper, he says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?†He seemed to understand that his teacher, his friend, was worth dying for. And yet all of that conviction melted away in the horror of the Cross. Maybe he had never truly known that depth of conviction and love for someone else before. Maybe there was no way he could piece together the broken pillar he had erected, no way to remember that he had already seen death made a mockery once, no way to find the breath beneath him again.
And how it must have stung to hear this tearful, awed, jubilant proclamation from his friends: “We have seen the Lord!â€
It couldn’t be, he must have thought. We’re back on earth, remember? Closed fist, closed hearts, closed grave. Dead is dead is dead.
No breath. No life.
And yet, even despite all this, he came to be with them again.
Still seeking. Still loving.
And discovered that he was no more on earth, but in free flight, in open hands, with an open heart, before an empty grave.
Because love blows open all closed things, and holds what once was dead aloft to be warmed into life by the sun again.
Because God has confronted every solid truth that stands in the way of life and shattered it in the sunrise of new life, new wisdom, new truth – and with the gift of that very breath that holds us up, empowers us to do the same, to proclaim that death is not the end, and that we can always choose healing, forgiveness, and resurrection.
What possible response can we offer but unbridled, dizzy, falling-down love?
I’ll close with a poem from Abu al-Hassan al-Kharaqani, a 10th century Sufi teacher, translated by Omid Safi in his beautiful book Radical Love.
“Don’t be meek in this love…
For God is bold, and likes those who are bold in adoration.
This path is for the bold, the intoxicated, the love-crazed.
With God, being love-crazed, intoxicated, and bold works.â€
