memento vivere

It has been common, perhaps since the advent of print news media, for religious leaders to publish meditations or words of comfort or exhortations in response to national (or local) crises or on national (or local) commemorative days. As you may have noticed, I am not one such religious leader. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that I don’t really consider myself a “religious leader”; I am neither a pope nor a bishop nor a Martin Luther King, Jr., Billy Graham, o

When Emily and I were married, twenty-plus years ago, some good friends gave us a Christian book on marriage as a wedding present. In the first few years of our marriage we read through it at least twice, and still to this day we apply a number of the principles that we learned from it. The overall premise of the book is that God’s design for marriage is not to make us happy, but to make us holy. One of the points that the author makes is that we tend to think of the pursuit

One of the many things I love about the parish I serve is how long it takes the congregation to pass the peace. In many churches in the US, at the peace folks will stay nestled in their pew and only greet the people in their immediate vicinity. Not at All Saints’! Here, it’s as if the captain has turned off the fasten seatbelt sign and all are suddenly free to move about the cabin. Which is a beautiful thing. As some more seasoned Episcopalians will remember, before the 1979

A final (indirect) reference to Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey: HT: @JosiahHawthorne This playful meme, which I recently stumbled upon, raises at least two questions: What is the church? And, more importantly, what is the church’s purpose? The Episcopal Catechism defines the Church as “the community of the New Covenant” (BCP 854). And it defines the New Covenant as “the new relationship with God given by Jesus Christ, the Messiah, to the apostles; and, through them, to all

This past weekend I finally saw what all the fuss has been about: I watched Christopher Nolan’s cinematic rendition of the Odyssey. It’s been a number of years since I last read Homer, and I am no classicist, so I’m ill-qualified to comment on the success (or failure) of Nolan’s interpretation. However, I can at least say that his portrayal of the events on Circe’s island provides some rich fodder for further reflection. In Homer’s account, when the goddess Circe turns a numb

In the Gospel of Matthew, just before Jesus miraculously feeds the crowd of 15,000-plus people (we’re told it was 5,000 men “besides women and children,” of whom there were likely at least 10,000), he spends all day healing those in the crowd who were sick. This story reveals two things about God’s will for the world—first, that God wishes to heal the world of its infirmities, and second, that God’s desire is for the world to find lasting satisfaction in Christ, the living Wo

Periodically I use different forms of the Eucharistic Prayer for All Saints’ principal Sunday service. (Currently, we are using the “Star Trek” prayer [Prayer C], so named because of the words: “the vast expanse of interstellar space . . . and this fragile earth, our island home.”) Hearing old, familiar ideas and themes spoken in different words can be a useful shock to the system, as it is a potential antidote to the natural tendency of frequently repeated ritual to become s

What would life be like if we were always ready to die? If wisdom is at all to be desired, then regular, if not frequent, consideration of...

What is salvation? One thing it is not is a form of postmortem fire insurance—a get out of jail free card assuring us that because we said a prayer or filled out a card or “gave our lives to Jesus” in some moment of crisis we are hereby and forevermore spared from the fires of hell. Salvation, according to 1 Corinthians 1:18, is a process. As Paul wrote, “the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power . . .

A number of weeks ago, I described how I went from being an atheist to a mildly fundamentalistic non-denominational evangelical missionary. The question now is, what drew me from conservative non-denominationalism to the Episcopal Church? I should begin by defining my terms. By “fundamentalistic” I mean believing in the supremacy and inerrancy of the Bible. [NB: Not all evangelicals are fundamentalists, and many evangelicals regard “fundamentalist” to be a pejorative term. By

Last week, I shared how around age 13 I became an atheist and that the intellectual justification for my de-conversion was the problem of suffering and evil. In early high school, I endured a traumatic experience, which gave me a deep emotional reason for rejecting God—but I won’t go into that here. As I also shared, music (and especially the pursuit of a successful musical career) was my god. One reason for this (if René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire carries any weight)

Since the beginning of my rectorship, a number of folks have asked for more details about my conversion to Christianity, so the thought occurred to me: why not put it in writing? The story begins with my de-conversion. I sometimes forget that I was born a Quaker. My earliest memories of church are of gatherings of the Society of Friends in a small house just northwest of downtown Houston, TX. (It’s where I had my first taste of pumpkin pie.) Around my fifth birthday, my paren

It is perhaps a miracle that, throughout the nearly twenty-eight years I lived in Texas, I never saw a rattlesnake in the wild. I had to go to upstate New York to experience the thrill. During the two weeks that we were away from the parish, Emily, the girls, and I spent several days on Lake George in the Adirondacks. On our last day there, I decided to go for one more hike and prepared to set out alone on a trail leading to the top of a cliff overlooking the lake. Wisely rem