Francis at 100 days: ‘the world’s parish priest’
National Catholic Reporter: Usual models would thus say that so far, Francis has been all sizzle and no steak. Yet at the grassroots, there’s a palpable sense something seismic is underway.
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Leadership Education at Duke Divinity, News & Ideas, June 19, 2013
By Pat McCaughan
[The Episcopal News, Diocese of Los Angeles] These days, the Rev. Canon Malcolm Boyd prefers quiet revolutions to the public upheavals that have distinguished his life and times for decades.
The Hollywood executive turned Episcopal priest, Freedom Rider, anti-war and gay rights activist, author, playwright, social critic and church revivalist will be 90 on June 8 and has been busy being filmed for a documentary about his life.
“This is the first time anyone has made a film of my life,” he chuckled during a recent telephone interview from his Los Angeles-area home, adding: “I just show up and I’m filmed.”
On April 27, Los Angeles filmmaker Andrew Thomas was on hand to document the Lambda Literary Foundation’s 25th annual benefit event OUTWRITE! honoring Boyd and other celebrated West Hollywood LGBT literary pioneers.
Malcolm Boyd, photographed for an interview after the 1965 publication of Are You Running With Me, Jesus? a book of unconventional but deeply devout prayers that made Boyd an international celebrity.
Perhaps best known for Are You Running with Me, Jesus? “a little book of prayers” he wrote in 1965, Boyd still is working, both as writer-in-residence of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles and as a regular columnist for the Huffington Post, exploring issues of life, death and aging gracefully, with his characteristic sense of humor.
Like a recent column about attempts to renew his driver’s license that ultimately yielded the desired result.
“Let’s just say I’m legal now,” he laughed.
Despite his advanced age, “Retirement wasn’t a reality, obviously. It’s kind of a process,” Boyd said. So is reflection, and the documentary undertaking by the award-winning Thomas has offered ample opportunity for that.
“Malcolm and Mark (Thompson, an author and Boyd’s partner of 30 years) and I went to Grace Cathedral and walked the labyrinth. He spoke at some events,” Thomas said during a recent telephone interview. “We’ve done four interviews with Malcolm so far; we just sit in a room quietly and we don’t deal with questions; we deal with themes and see where it takes us.
“Malcolm has forgotten more than I’ll ever learn,” added Thomas, who hopes to complete the film in time for a fall release. Thomas has written, produced and/or directed highly acclaimed episodes of such TV series as “COPS” and “Modern Marvels.” He has received several Emmy award nominations for work on the History Channel, A&E, Discovery and the Sci-Fi Channel. His 2009 film “The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi” about the jazz great has accumulated five film festival Best Documentary awards.
Ironically, it was that film which led him to Boyd, he said.
“Guaraldi composed ‘Cast Your Fate to the Wind’ and the music for ‘Peanuts’ and I realized that Malcolm worked with Vince twice in his life,” Thomas recalled. “[Vince] composed all the music for the very first jazz mass at Grace Cathedral and Malcolm did the sermon and then a month later, Malcolm did a series of performances at the hungry i [a café in San Francisco],” he recalled.
After some initial checking, Thomas discovered Boyd was alive and well and “living about two miles from me,” the filmmaker recalled. “It was a wonderful, serendipitous moment to know that one of your heroes is still alive.”
Even more serendipitous has been his discovery of historical “reel to reel” film footage of Boyd and other unpublished materials, along with interviews of people from seminal moments in Boyd’s life.
Like a conversation with Penny Liuzzo, daughter of Detroit homemaker Viola Liuzzo, who was part of a group that met weekly at Boyd’s apartment during his Wayne State University chaplaincy days. Viola Liuzzo was so inspired by Boyd’s civil rights activism she left home and family to work for voter rights. She was murdered on March 25, 1965, the last night of the Selma, Alabama, voting rights march.
And like Woody King Jr., “the great actor who worked with Malcolm on ‘A Study in Color’ and ‘Boy’ and a lot of those somewhat subversive plays Malcolm did about racism back in the early 1960s,” Thomas said.
“[King] said Malcolm would never bring up religion or Christianity … but after working with him for a few weeks, they all realized they were inspired to go back to the word.
“[Malcolm] inspires people to go on their own journey,” Thomas said. “It reminded me of the time we were taking a walk and Malcolm said, ‘the point here is not to spend your life looking for God but to allow God to find you.’ It’s typical of his way of twisting the traditional mundane approach to life and trying on a different hat and looking at it from a new perspective.
“It’s part of his incredible deep well of empathy. That’s just who Malcolm is.”
‘Trailblazer, truth-teller, courageous witness,’ reluctant hero
Boyd was born in Buffalo, New York on June 8, 1923 to fashion model Beatrice Lowrie and financier Melville Boyd, “an alcoholic and womanizer. I later understood him and conducted his burial service. His father was an Episcopal priest, but he died so young,” Boyd said.
After his parents divorced in the 1930s, Boyd and his mother moved to Colorado. He survived bouts of atheism during his undergraduate college years, and made his way to Hollywood where he worked as a junior producer before entering seminary in 1951.
He was ordained to the priesthood in 1955 and after extended studies, became Colorado State University chaplain four years later. There he was dubbed the “espresso priest” for his talks given in coffee houses and bars.
He has written more than 30 books and is considered an icon for righteous social struggle and a hero to many, including author Nora Gallagher and gay rights activist the Rev. Susan Russell.
“There are so many things I could say about Malcolm Boyd as a trailblazer, truth-teller, and courageous witness to the power of God’s inclusive love,” said Russell, a blogger, Huffington Post contributor and senior associate at All Saints Church in Pasadena.
“It is no exaggeration to say that his Are You Running With Me, Jesus? fed the hunger of a generation of people who had given up on the church or anyone connected with it having anything relevant to say. His willingness to put his faith into action by marching in Selma to end segregation was a powerful witness to what former Presiding Bishop John Hines called ‘justice as the corporate face of God’s love,’” Russell said via e-mail.
“And his example as an out-gay priest in a time when such a thing was practically unimaginable was – and continues to be – an inspiration to all who work for the full inclusion of LGBT people in this church and in this country,” added Russell, a gay rights activist.
Gallagher, a parishioner at Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara and author of “Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic” (Alfred P. Knopf, 2013) said in the foreword of a reprinted version of Running that Boyd’s famous book of prayers “made it possible for me to imagine a church that had something to do with what was happening in the world, to see that the work of the faithful is to expose injustice.”
Yet, Boyd is reluctant to take credit for being an icon for social justice for many, or even a hero to some.
He does acknowledge sacrificing personal privacy for public persona, for “belonging to the church” even as early on as 1951, when he dissolved his partnership with Hollywood stars Mary Pickford and Buddy Rogers to enter the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California.
In the 1940s, Malcolm Boyd was a business partner of film star Mary Pickford before he departed the Hollywood scene in 1951 to attend Church Divinity School of the Pacific.
Again, with characteristic humor, he quipped that at his going-away party “with a lot of celebrities, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper said that everyone, including the bartender, bowed their heads for the Lord’s Prayer.”
But “it was all new ground,” he said recalling tumultuous decades of his life. “I had no textbook. What happened came out of a very strong sense of responsibility because I realized that I was speaking for a number of other people who did not have a voice.”
It meant frequently running afoul of authorities, both church and civic. While Boyd was serving as Colorado State University chaplain, students flocked to his coffeehouse campus ministry but “the bishop, without coming to look at the work, characterized it as “beatnik” and said, “you can’t call yourself a beloved child of God if you have matted hair, smell badly or wear black underwear.”
“To me, this was blasphemy,” Boyd recalled.
“I thought, if this was the church, then to hell with the church because it wasn’t the church of Jesus Christ. And if it wasn’t the church of Jesus Christ, then let me get out where I could breathe fresh air. Then, I answered him, that yes, you can call yourself a beloved child of God if you have matted hair, smell badly or wear black underwear.”
He moved on, invited by then-bishop of Michigan Richard Emrich to serve as Wayne State University chaplain in Detroit. His activism in full swing, he demonstrated with the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as well as Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian who was murdered in Selma, Alabama in August 1965 by white supremacists.
“I was involved in an enveloping process,” Boyd said.
“The summer of ’65 was the hardest,” he said, recalling his own harrowing close calls with white supremacists and feelings of alienation and fear.
In 1977, he came out as gay. “At this point, you could throw your hands up and scream, because what do you do with a story like this?” he said, laughing. “Here’s Malcolm Boyd, with all of this — terribly controversial — and now on top of everything, he’s a queer?”
Malcolm Boyd and author Mark Thompson have been a couple for 30 years. Photo/Mary Glasspool
Back in Los Angeles, he served local parishes, continued writing and public speaking engagements and met author and photographer Mark Thompson, his life partner of 30 years.
He now considers himself an elder and his life “an odd story, to put it mildly. It was quite a lot to live through, so I’m grateful to anybody who helped — and a number of people did.”
Aging and the prospect of turning 90 brings yet new “surprises. It’s like being on the Titanic. You’re out there on the ocean and somebody spots an iceberg. It ain’t going away.”
He added that: “Wouldn’t it be great if all of us — you and I, for instance — might take ourselves a wee bit less seriously?
All kidding aside, he still accepts occasional preaching and speaking engagements and is spiritual director to about a dozen people. Always the activist, he adds: “I accept myself as an elder. I think elders need to analyze their own position in society and in some cases argue with society about what their position is because I think there’s all sorts of stereotypes about elderly people right now.”
Perhaps his own experiences could still serve as a primer for the church: “There’s too much talk about the future of the church and meetings and discussions,” he said. “If you have faith, the main thing now is to move, one foot ahead of another, and to trust in God.”
As always, Boyd looks to the future with hope, adding: “Let’s do this again in 10 years.”
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Episcopal News Service, June 7, 2013
This article originally appeared in the Ministry Report, an Anglican Journal supplement produced by the Resources for Mission department. To learn how your gifts support mission, read the full report online now.
Back in the corporate Canada of the 1980s, video emerged as a bold new way to talk to the troops. The Anglican Church of Canada was in the forefront of Canadian Christian denominations when it established its video arm in 1988, under Lisa Barry.
A vibrant component of the church’s Communications and Information Resources Department, Anglican Video has always been committed to capturing the stories out in the field rather than recording them in the studio.
Its first big project was documenting the inaugural Native Convocation (now called Sacred Circle), a national gathering of indigenous and other Anglicans held over two weeks in Fort Qu’Appelle, Sask., in 1988. Video is an optimal fit for working with indigenous people, says Barry, “because First Nations culture is rooted in oral tradition.”
The church’s video arm has also reached out to encourage the participation of Anglicans at large. In 2008’s award-winning Amazing Grace project, for example, it used social media to collect footage of groups across Canada performing the world’s best-known hymn. The project raised more than $100,000 for suicide prevention in northern Canada.
“People were even using their cellphones to send in their versions,” says Barry.
In a similar spirit, 2010’s Silent Night project collected videos of church communities singing renditions of the beloved carol and at the same time raised funds for the military ordinariate.
Another priority is its documentation of the physical and emotional abuse in the Indian residential schools, a testimony that Anglican Video initiated in 1990.
“That has probably been our most groundbreaking work,” says Barry. Her award-winning documentary Topahdewin: The Gladys Cook Story continues to be an important resource work for anti-racism and social work.
Anglican Video’s story has been one of rapid technological change. In the early years, Barry could scarcely lift the bulky cameras of the day and had to hire help.
Now she travels light with digital camcorders and sometimes does the shooting herself. She can edit footage on a laptop anywhere and upload it immediately, instead of sending tapes to Toronto.
Nowhere was this more useful than at the summer 2012 gathering of Sacred Circle. “We were able to immediately edit key moments we wanted to share and get them up on the site the same evening,” says production manager, Becky Boucher.
Barry and Boucher also produce resources for Anglican parishes and individuals, as well as material for broader faith audiences on spiritual topics ranging from baptism and prayer to pilgrimage, prophecy and Bible study.
But their main focus is communicating the Anglican perspective.
“We remain committed to telling the Anglican story to the world,” says Barry. “It’s the most important thing we can do.”
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Anglican Church of Canada, June 3, 2013
By Diana Swift
They play the mightiest of instruments in the most solemn of settings, but they’re not above having a little fun. Listen carefully and you may discern a bar or two of a nursery song or sea shanty in the hymns played by your church organist.
According to David Drinkell, master of the music at the Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in St. John’s, Nfld., organists have long been known to sneak secular fare into the hymnal lineup.
“Not many people know that ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’ fits almost exactly as a descant over ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save.’ And not many have noticed that the second half of the tune of ‘Nativity’ is identical to that of ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,’” says British-born Drinkell.
“Organists sometimes succumb to the temptation to weave secular melodies into their performances. In this, they are following hallowed precedent,” he adds. Renaissance composers often used such melodies as the basis of mass settings. The English folksong “O Westron Wynde” was popular as a mass template and so was the French song “L’homme armé.”
Stephen Mallinger, organist and choirmaster at St. Luke’s Cathedral in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., admits that he has occasionally slipped the melody of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” into an accommodating hymn—to the notice of virtually no one!
But larger interpolations can bring trouble. One of Drinkell’s predecessors at Belfast Cathedral was sacked from his previous post at a Roman Catholic church for playing the Orangeman’s song “The Boyne Water” during Sunday mass.
Drinkell himself was once persuaded by the organist of the RC cathedral in Armagh to play the Orangeman ballad “The Sash My Father Wore” on the carillon. “I atoned for it a few days later by playing ‘Immaculate Mary, Thy Glories We Sing’ as they brought up the colours at an Orange service in Carrickfergus Parish Church.”
Drinkell says organists can use their discretion to their own advantage. One man auditioning for a job with a Presbyterian church was asked to improvise something while the collection was being brought up to the front. “The minister had just made a plea for funds to repair the church roof and asked that all those who would pledge $50 stand. The organist played ‘O Canada.’ He got the job!”
Weddings and funerals stand out in many an organist’s mind. “Some couples ask for unusual music. Last year, one bride and groom who were sci-fi enthusiasts were played out to the ‘Widor Toccata’ on top and the main theme from Star Wars on the pedals,” says Drinkell. And one bride marched up the aisle to the theme song from Chariots of Fire.
Once, at the funeral of a Belfast city dignitary, Drinkell obliged the widow but surprised the guests by playing two popular songs from the couple’s long-ago courting days: “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” and “I Could Have Danced All Night.”
And organists often go their own route. According to a recent online survey by Christian Research, a U.K. Christian-resources consulting group (www.christian-research.org), more than 50 per cent of respondents reported noticing “tune smuggling” by a church organist.
One master of the pipes, playing at the funeral of a man known to have been a big drinker, reportedly got the sack for sneaking in his rendition of “The Beer Barrel Polka.” And one organist in Scotland who had bad relations with some of the church elders wreaked his revenge as they processed by playing “Send in the Clowns.”
The poll also reported numerous instances of irreverent organists who smuggled in tunes ranging from “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” on a wet-weather day to Abba’s “Money, Money, Money” during the offertory.
Dr. Giles Bryant, former choirmaster at the Cathedral Church of St. James in Toronto and now director of music at All Saints’ in Peterborough, Ont., recalls nipping out during the sermon for a pint at the adjoining pub when he sang in the choir at St. James, Spanish Place, in London.
He also recalls moments “when a cold black hand gripped your heart,” such as when, at an overcrowded service at St. James’, the processing choir boys who had been told to follow the crucifer to their assigned posts at all costs, followed him out the door.
And at weddings where the bride was fashionably late, Bryant recalls playing a version of “Adeste Fideles” that is usually accompanied by the words: “Why are we waiting?”
During the communion he has occasionally “improvised on ‘Happy Birthday to You,’ cleaned up for church use, if you know what I mean.” Once at St. James’ he was rewarded with a beatific smile from a monk in his 70s whose birthday it was.
And while he has never used his organist’s prerogative to get back at members of the clergy, he has come in hard and fast toward the end of long homilies. “I’ve never cut a priest off, but at the end of a particularly lengthy and boring sermon there’s a way you can come in with the next hymn that tells the whole congregation, ‘Thank God that’s it’s over.’ ”
Bryant doesn’t recall getting any requests for pop songs at weddings, but funerals are a different matter. “The worst case was a funeral where the family wanted the body to be taken from the church to the organ playing ‘I Did It My Way.’ ” With due respect to Frank Sinatra, Bryant politely refused and told them to get a tape.
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Anglican Journal News, June 6, 2013
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Everything began in 1940 when, at the age of twenty-five, Brother Roger left Switzerland, the country where he was born, to go and live in France, the country his mother came from. For years he had been ill with tuberculosis, and during that long convalescence he had matured within him the call to create a community.
When the Second World War began, he had the conviction that without wasting time he should come to the assistance of people going through this ordeal, just as his grandmother had done during the First World War. The small village of Taizé, where he settled, was quite close to the demarcation line dividing France in two: it was well situated for sheltering refugees fleeing the war. Friends from Lyon started giving the address of Taizé to people in need of a place of safety.
In Taizé, thanks to a modest loan, Brother Roger bought a house with outlying buildings that had been uninhabited for years. He asked one of his sisters, Genevieve, to come and help him offer hospitality. Among the refugees they sheltered were Jews. Material resources were limited. There was no running water, so for drinking water they had to go to the village well. Food was simple, mainly soups made from corn flour bought cheaply at the nearby mill. Out of discretion towards those he was sheltering, Brother Roger prayed alone; he often went to sing far from the house, in the woods. So that none of the refugees, Jews or agnostics, would feel ill-at-ease, Genevieve explained to each person that it was better for those who wished to pray to do so alone in their rooms.
Brother Roger’s parents, knowing that their son and daughter were in danger, asked a retired French officer who was a friend of the family to watch over them. In the autumn of 1942, he warned them that their activities had been found out and that everyone should leave at once. So until the end of the war, it was in Geneva that Brother Roger lived and it was there that he began a common life with his first brothers. They were able to return to Taizé in 1944.
In 1945, a young lawyer from the region set up an association to take charge of children who had lost their parents in the war. He suggested to the brothers that they welcome a certain number of them in Taizé. A men’s community could not receive children. So Brother Roger asked his sister Genevieve to come back to take care of them and become their mother. On Sundays, the brothers also welcomed German prisoners-of-war interned in a camp nearby Taizé.
Gradually other young men came to join the original group, and on Easter Day 1949, there were seven of them who committed themselves together for their whole life in celibacy and to a life together in great simplicity.
In the silence of a long retreat, during the winter of 1952-53, the founder of the community wrote the Rule of Taizé, expressing for his brothers “the essential that makes the common life possible”.
Taizé Community: http://www.taize.fr/
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Episcopal News Service, May 28, 2013 (Link: http://www.taize.fr/ )
By Mark MacDonald
This column first appeared in the May issue of the Anglican Journal.
Richard Twiss, famous Lakota Christian and my friend, was one of the most engaging and compelling people I have ever met. When he tragically died of a heart attack at age 58 on February 9, 2013, he left a void that, in human terms, will be almost impossible to fill. He played a key role in the broader acceptance of the contextualization of the gospel into indigenous life. As a committed evangelical, he led many indigenous and non-indigenous Christians to understand that culture is a vital and necessary home for the “Word made flesh.”
I met him 28 years ago, when he was a short-haired pastor in a three-piece suit. Though we held prayer services at powwows together, he seemed suspicious of the capacity of someone like me to really know Jesus. I was suspicious about whether someone like him could be truly sensitive to indigenous culture. Well, he sure showed me. I hope I showed him.
His impact, along with his many friends and co-workers, will only become truly clear over time. Through this work, it is now quite common to see the drum and indigenous protocols used in indigenous Christian gatherings and communities. Beyond this, indigenous Christians are now seen as a possible rallying point for the Christian movement around the world.
Richard was charismatic and inspiring, but for many of us, the most impressive aspect of his life was the way the faith was embodied in his family and friendships. It was the congruence of this faith with his happy and warm way of life that inspired others to follow Jesus and to live for their people and culture with honour and dignity. Like many, this aspect of Twiss family life touched us personally. When my wife, Virginia, suddenly became ill a few years back, Richard’s wife, Katherine, was staying with us. Her calm, steady and loving presence helped us through an enormous crisis. It was a vivid experience of the strength of their great mutual ministry.
I hope you will look into this life. (See his ministry website at www.wiconi.com/.) There is much to learn from Richard. Most important, we should be reminded that the way we live is often the most important witness to what we say and believe. Richard was creative and smart, but I don’t think that would have meant so much if we hadn’t seen the reality of his life.
Bishop Mark MacDonald is national indigenous bishop of the Anglican Church of Canada.
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Anglican Journal News, May 27, 2013
By Pat McCaughan
[Episcopal News Service] The Holy Spirit comes, for some, as a comforting presence. For others, it’s a disturbing upsetter. And still, for others, it is mysterious, even scary.
But don’t confuse it just with Pentecost – the 50th day after Easter – which the church observes this Sunday (May 19) and which “challenges us to focus at least one day on the Spirit’s activity in our life,” according to the Rev. Janet Broderick, rector of St. Peter’s Church, in Morristown, New Jersey.
“That’s what’s wonderful about the lectionary, it has us focus on this,” Broderick said during a May 16 interview. “I wish it were more, because the Spirit is outnumbered in the prayers, in the lectionary.”
While the Spirit hovered over the deep during creation (Genesis 1.1-7), it still hovers today but “we are so often afraid to talk about it,” Broderick added.
“Take a thing like someone who has a revelation or a word. People suddenly know something. They know suddenly their mother died. Or, their child would be safe or found. They knew. But they tell you in whispers; years later. They’re ashamed to say it because the idea is, if you talk about the Spirit, you’re crazy or worse than crazy, you’re presumptuous, you think you’re better than others.”
The Rev. Bill Countryman, professor emeritus of biblical studies at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California, said the Spirit defies definition. Its dual nature “can’t be pinned down. We don’t have control, therefore it requires a lot of reflection for individuals and community to discern what the Spirit is doing, and it’s never neat.”
The Spirit speaks to us through Scripture and sacrament, through gifts of ministry and in the experience of daily life and through other people and in conflict, he said.
It is “as simple as the strength we get from receiving the Eucharist again and again, which shapes our lives and tell us God is constantly with us, nourishing us, guiding us, giving us a sort of pattern to rely on in our lives,” he said.
But it can also be chaotic, upsetting and usher in change.
“The big changes in the Episcopal Church in my adult life have been responses above all to that,” Countryman said. “It became harder and harder to see any reason why women couldn’t be ordained, because there were women who had received gifts of ministry and who had great holiness of life, so why was it that only men could be ordained?
“The same thing happened again, with regard to gay and lesbian people,” he added. “It became harder to maintain the idea that same-sex attraction is simply an evil because there were so people who manifested holiness and gifts within the church who happened to be gay and lesbian. That’s an aspect of the Spirit’s work that we have most particularly been responding to and that’s been difficult for us.”
He added that “the Spirit is leading us into the truth of what Jesus already told us. It’s also the way in which the Gospel transforms our lives and no one generation is ever going to get that right. The whole history of humanity won’t get it right but the good news is, there’s hope even in our nastiest situations.”
Discerning the movement of the Spirit
Linnea Collins, manager of a Sun Valley, Idaho dental office, felt the Spirit’s powerful presence a year ago when she was finally able to answer a haunting question: “What is my ministry?
“I always thought I was on a track for ordination, priest or deacon,” Collins said during a recent telephone interview. “I went through discernment and they asked me about my ministry. I said I don’t know, I guess to walk with the people of God. It kept coming back to me, what is my ministry.”
Then last year, she “had a significant birthday and my son-in-law asked me ‘what is the one thing in your life you’d like to accomplish’.”
Suddenly, the answer was right there: “to work in a free medical or dental clinic.” After voicing it, the next step was obvious, especially when she learned of an available comparable position at the Boise-based Genesis World Mission (GWM), a nonprofit healthcare solutions agency.
Surprisingly, the agency offered her not one, but two jobs – as dental office manager and fund development director, because she had directed the annual Trailing of the Sheep Festival, honoring the local sheepherding tradition, for several years.
“What I think might be the right time is not necessarily God’s time,” said Collins, 60. “All of our patients live at or below 200 percent of federal poverty guidelines, without Medicaid, without benefits; they are low-wage earners. One medical bill will break their budgets.
“But now, I have a ministry of action, a ministry of serving, and I think our patients do feel a difference, that they’re not a number. We wrap our arms around them. We do help them access medical and dental health and it is free.”
The Holy Spirit “works in great ways when you least expect it,” she added. “Sometimes you think God and the Spirit aren’t there, and you think ‘the heck with that, I’m going to power through this my way. It never works. It just doesn’t.”
Now, participating in the process of “creating a new program working with emergency rooms for folks with dental emergencies who have nowhere to go, I couldn’t be happier,” she said. “This may not be ‘the church’ but it is an extension of the church where we live daily our faith, compassion, love and ministry for those who need us most, the vulnerable and many times invisible.”
“Now, I’ve got a perfect match of putting all those pieces of my life and experience together. It sounds like a crazy story, but it’s my story.”
The Spirit’s gift of peace
Although he wasn’t familiar with any church, Jon Finley, 48, of San Diego knew instinctively he was in the presence of the Holy Spirit 16 years ago, during a moment that changed his life forever.
He’d just been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. “I was devastated, because I hadn’t told anyone, even my closest friends, that I was gay,” he said during a recent telephone interview.
“I was scared, I wasn’t responding to any treatment or medication. I was losing weight. The doctor told me I had to quit work and go on disability. All I could think about was ‘how am I going to live? My whole world felt like it was turned upside down and I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening.”
With family in another state and the future uncertain, he contemplated suicide. “I was sitting in a chair sobbing,” he recalled. “I could hardly catch my breath. I was in a very dark place.”
Then, suddenly, “this feeling of calm came over me, a calm that I’ve never ever experienced before,” he said. “I still get cold chills when I think of it. It was like a weight was lifted off me and I knew that somehow everything was going to be OK.”
He knew it was the Holy Spirit because “it wasn’t me. I was hysterical. I really can’t describe it in words, I just knew. That was the start of my pursuit of religion.”
Although he still didn’t respond to the medication “my attitude changed. I was like a new person. The doctor said ‘whatever you’re doing, keep doing it,’” said Finley, who was confirmed at St. Paul’s Cathedral in San Diego at the March 30 Easter vigil this year.
Before his confirmation, he shared his story publicly, for the first time, with the congregation.
“This is a whole new chapter for my life and I’m putting it out there for everybody,” he said. “It’s just amazing to realize where I was before and to see where I am now. I feel like the Spirit guided me here, has guided me through that dark place and led me to the cathedral and to the point where I could finally speak the truth.
“Before, I thought I would rather die than let anyone know any of these things about me, I was so ashamed. Now I can say, this is my story.”
Accessing the Spirit
The Rev. Mary Crist, priest-in-charge at St. Michael’s Mission Outreach Center in Riverside, California, describes a Pentecost-like experience when she encountered a grief-stricken mother in the neonatal intensive care unit at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles.
“She was Latina, and she was crying. I greeted her in Spanish, but I only speak a little Spanish. She didn’t speak English. There were no other Spanish speakers around at all,” Crist recalled during a May 16 telephone interview.
“She told me that she had given birth to 23-week-old twins and that her baby boy had died the previous day. Her baby girl was going to be removed from the ventilator in the morning.
“I call it a Holy Spirit moment because it was pastoral for all of us,” Crist said. “I sat down and we held each other. I felt very deeply I was given the tools to communicate, to listen, to act compassionately, to be of comfort to her.”
The second twin died during that night but the moment “changed me forever,” Crist said. “It gave me that sense [that] I don’t have to always have words or to be able to do what I think I should say or do.
“It was just immersing myself in the love of God through that comforter. I believe we can access it because it was promised to us on Pentecost and I believe we can access it when we’re open to it.”
The Rev. Judith Favor, who teaches at the Claremont School of Theology in California, is ordained in the United Church of Christ and is a spiritual director, says one way to tap into the Spirit’s presence is through “mindfulness meditation.
“Contemplative focus on the breath and/or repeating a single word in centering prayer cleanses the lens of perception, scrubs the mind clean of toxic worries and opens the heart to receive the subtle invitations from the sacred,” she said.
Another way is to “slow things down,” she added. When offering spiritual direction, “I invite the speaker to pause in the usual rush of talk, to notice subtle nudges from the beloved, to name delicate emotions, to linger with touches of presence and to savor them.”
She adds that: “The path of love can be rigorous, demanding and difficult. Saying yes to God and each other is always challenging, especially if the other person is rooted in a different culture, language or religious tradition. Letting go of ‘otherizing’ is very hard but the contemplative path awakens us and invites us to keep showing up for sacred and human encounters.”
Says Countryman: “The Holy Spirit will always remain a mystery to us and that’s good. It’s a reminder that we don’t know it all, that we still have more to learn, a lot more growing to do in the faith. That, and all these things are great protections against idolatry. It’s so easy for us to take the faith as we happen to know it, and to treat it as if it were identical with God. But God is always greater than what we have.”
–The Rev. Pat McCaughan is a correspondent for the Episcopal News Service. She is based in Los Angeles.
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Episcopal News Service, May 17, 2013
By Diana Swift
Bangladesh has a high rate of maternal mortality—about 194 per 1,000 births in 2010—but this is steadily falling. And the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF) is helping the developing country to reach its targeted reduction to 143 maternal deaths per 1,000 by 2015.
The leading causes of these deaths are hemorrhage, eclampsia (a condition of pregnancy arising from high blood pressure and leading to coma) and obstructed labour, visiting Bangladeshi speaker Parash Baral explained recently in an informal address at Anglican Church House in Toronto.
In Bangladesh only 20 per cent of pregnant women are delivered by mainstream medical professionals; more than 70 per cent of mothers seek care from traditional, unpaid birth attendants known as dais. “The dai is a highly respected and trusted member of the community,” said Baral, a project manager for the NGO UBINIG. “She will drop whatever she is doing and immediately go to a woman in need of care.”
The PWRDF is currently partnering with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and UBINIG to provide enhanced training for these attendants.
Speaking on April 17, Baral explained how PWRDF funding is providing better access to prenatal, neonatal and child health care in 15 selected districts from different areas of Bangladesh, each with it own culture, language, food and geographical conditions.
New training programs not only enhance the dais’ existing midwifery skills and knowledge of medicinal plants, but also enable them to provide nutritional counselling to improve the diets of mothers-to-be. “The dais are trained to understand problems faced by pregnant women and the signs of a problem pregnancy, as well as trained in nutrition and maternal and child health care,” said Zaida Bastos, a PWRDF program co-ordinator. The current training project involves 650 midwives selected out of 778.
Care is based in maternal health centres called daighors, which are constructed with start-to-finish input from local leaders and with locally available building materials, from bamboo to bricks and corrugated tin “The centres have to be built back from the road to ensure privacy and they have to have an open space in front for meetings,” said Baral.
Increasing numbers of villages are turning to the daighors for maternal and neonatal care, with some serving many more villages than originally intended.
The PWRDF project, which ends in 2015, is also funding the construction of fleet of ingenious tricycle ambulances to transport mothers in need of care to the women’s health centres, as well as several flat-bottomed boats to ferry the ambulances across Bangladesh’s many rivers. “Each river has unique currents and winds, and it can take a couple of hours to get across,” Baral said.
The PWRDF-CIDA-UBINIG project will serve 130 villages in the 15 districts. UBINIG (Unnayan Bikalper Nitinirdharoni Gobeshona) was established in 1984 in Dhaka as a research, policy and advocacy agency.
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Anglican Journal News, May 13, 2013
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