Category: The Magazine

In the last year, we have been presented with the opportunity to know the Prayer Book more intimately as friend and companion. While we have been, to varying degrees, separated from the Eucharist, the Prayer Book has been there for us offering community in isolation. In a time of great absence, it has served as a sacramental presence, an outward and visible sign of the presence of grace among us. In so doing, it has embodied for us the potential to realize that, despite distance, we are all connected and sustained by the mysterious yet abiding depth of a divine incarnational love.

Inter-generational Collaboration Building requires new thinking and creativity at a time when longer and healthier lives already are upending our notions about what it means to grow old. The skills that older adults can offer are well-suited to the needs of youth. Inter-generational engagement benefits the participants their faith communities.

You believed you would be welcome and safe in a country full of others yearning to breathe free.

You are not welcome by all in this country. You are not safe because of our faces.

Maybe they hate our faces because we remind them of what they used to be and are afraid of becoming again.

So, what do we do right now?

Every once in a while, I sit and think about one of my first ever challenging youth group kids, who, instead of sitting down with and having a hard conversation without relationship, I just continually loved on, showed respect to, and got to watch Jesus change her life instead. We can preach and teach and lecture and “pull aside,” but if we don’t have love, our clanging cymbals will drive someone away from truth. Love draws in.

She thinks back to Easter in the home country.  Were they still conducting open air Easter sunrise services?  Mid-April will probably be really hot.  She checks the weather for Hyderabad on her smartphone. It is thirty-eight degrees Celsius there, at six-fifteen in the evening.  She is glad she is here in B.C.  If only they could see an actual sunrise over the mountains.

It is not the intent here in these offerings to damn the institutional Church for its complicity in ageism. As we well know, “isms” are pervasive and finds their  expression in mandates, protocols, exclusion. We have heard it said, maybe, who it is who loves the details. But this “ism” for my focus leads, I believe, to images of fragile, incompetent, disabled men and women with “white collars around their necks.

How difficult to change a holy habit                                                   

           even for one holier.

They marked the time so they could tend the grave

While, unknown, this bursting Star of life                   

          was finishing the miracle of its own Sabbath sleep –

Or was it sleep?                                

          That Saturday is a secret kept by heaven —                

Ageism as defined by Ashton Applewhite, author of “This Chair Rocks”, is “stereotyping and discrimination based on a person’s age. We experience it any time someone assumes that we’re “too old” for something—a task, a haircut, a relationship—instead of finding out who we are and what we’re capable of. Or “too young;” ageism cuts both ways, although in a youth-obsessed society, olders bear the brunt of it.”

As a kid growing up in church, I experienced the Sunday morning matinee of miseries. My woes included a hard and unforgiving church pew, unbearably tight Mary Jane shoes, and a droning sermon that I never quite understood. After the service, I would take flight, turning my patent leather atrocities into streamlined track shoes as I raced for the church’s playground. But my vigilant mother always swooped in and steered me toward the line in the narthex.

Now is the time. The place in which we are living, this moment which is always passing away, this present is the time to make the choice. Not usually a significant or life-changing choice, but in every moment in which we are awake we are continually choosing how we will live our lives.