Language trips off the tongue before it is ever written down. Language is sound, and names are meant to be said, cried and whispered. In love, in friendship, in tears and laughter, in prayers. Names are to be spoken in the relationships which make up the fullness of human living. Names recall for us the essence of a person.
A trouble with New Year’s resolutions is that they don’t seem to “stick.” The promise of the Christian Faith is that God is with us, helping us always to turn to our better selves, and to grow into the fullness of who we are meant to be. This may sound like a cliché, but let me illustrate my point with three images: Scrooge, Groundhog Day, and “metanoia.”
I think that since a recent hospitalization and diagnosis with the early stages of diabetes, the physicality of Paul’s sufferings have taken on a new meaning for me. In particular, I am struck by his statement that we are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus.” Apparently, my diabetes is easily treatable, perhaps without medication. But it is still a serious health condition, the first I’ve had, and when I finally pass from this life, it may be what kills me.
Just last week talking to an old friend about my hunger to spend time with family, to be in the room with living, breathing with flesh descended from dad, to hear our stories and eat together. She said, ‘One dancer’s gone and you all are having to make a new choreography.’ Her words rang true. That image fit what we were doing and feeling.
Whenever I try to explain American grocery stores to my friends in Sudan, they don’t understand. They think I’m making it up. I’ve shown them pictures, even, but still, they can’t believe that Americans would have so much food in just one place, with so many choices to make. I have this dream of bringing a bunch of my friends to America just so I can take them on a tour of our grocery stores.
5:30 a.m. New York time, my phone wakened me. It was my wife, Ellen, calling from San Francisco. 2:30 a.m. there. She said it simply, ‘Donald, your dad has died.’ I heard it but had no idea what to do next. Ellen spoke to my stammering silence, ‘Come home now, your mother needs you.’
A few weeks ago I posted this status update: “Heidi finds it curious that when she visits other people’s profiles not as many of their friends post status updates. Is she a SU magnet? Theories welcome.”
I remember asking my own rector what day of the week he found best to take off. He said, “Well, I don’t have one regular day off. Enough happens in the parish that it’s hard to take the same day each week. But, I do try to take one whole day each week.” I knew then that he didn’t get a day off each week, and that if I could manage only that I’d be making progress.
For several weeks one Spring I joined a group that went birding in Central Park with an expert from the American Museum of Natural History. At the end of the time, I could tell a white-throated sparrow from a chipping sparrow. And when I saw the difference between a female pine warbler and a female ruby-crowned kinglet (the female isn’t ruby-crowned), I thought I might be getting somewhere.
It began to dawn on me that my overwhelming desire to finish or at least “fix” the Cathedral was akin to the quest of some to fix the present crisis in the Anglican Communion through any number of means, as though the Anglican Communion can be fixed or cleansed by sand-blasting, the empty porticoes filled in with saints hewn from stone who will guard us from all that is heretical and undesirable.