Who We Are

Word from Grace Street - Maps: Geographical & Otherwise

Posted by Wallace+

"In the mid-17th century, Spanish seafarers sailed up the west coast of the Americas to what is now known as the Baja peninsula. The cartographers of the time simply drew a straight line up from the Strait of California to the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Vancouver Island and Washington state. Consequently, the maps that were published in 1635 show very clearly that California was an island. For 50 years, then, the years of the most constant, most crucial explorations of the California coastline, those maps went unchanged because someone continued to work with partial information, assumed that data from the past had the inerrancy of tradition and then used authority to prove it. Finally, after years and years of new reports, a few cartographers, the heretics, the radicals and the rebels, I presume, began to issue a new version, and in 1721, the last mapmaker holdout finally attached California to the mainland. But - and this is the real tragedy, perhaps - it took almost 100 years for the gap between experience and authority to close. It took almost 100 years for the new maps to be declared official despite the fact that the people who were there all the time knew differently from the very first day." - Sister Joan Chittester, O.S.B. (from On Being with Krista Tippett)

Where are the gaps in our lives between experience and authority?  Where do our "maps" not match up with reality, with the reality both within and around us?

For the adventure that awaits, may God grant us both imagination and courage.

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Tags: on being, word from grace street

Word from Grace Street: To Be on Good Speaking Terms with Oneself

Posted by Wallace+

"To love one's neighbor as oneself."

Okay, but do we love ourselves?

And, if we don't consciously work at loving ourselves, how far do we expect to get with our neighbors?

Brother Curtis Almquist, of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, has said, "We love our neighbors the way we love ourselves."

Curtis reflects further,

"The hallmark of solitude is being on good speaking terms with oneself. Solitude invites you to be a very good friend to yourself, to enjoy your own company...Unless I can be a very good companion to myself, I probably cannot be a good member of a community, because I'm going to externalize, I'm going to project, a great deal of my longing, unwittingly and unfairly, onto other people, who simply are never going to be enough...You have to first be reconciled to yourself."

To love one another as God would have us love one another, first we must love ourselves: we must spend time with ourselves; we must, as Curtis says, be on good speaking terms with ourselves.

It's for our own good, yes; and for the sake of everyone around us.

Your brother in Christ,

Wallace+

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Tags: curtis almquist, word from grace street

September 11, 2001

Post by The Rev. Gena Adams-Riley

On the morning of September 11th 2001, I was traveling north toward Washington D.C. on I-395 from our apartment in Alexandria, Virginia.  I wrote a poem in the weeks that followed as I sorted through the experience of watching American Airlines Flight 77 crash into the Pentagon killing 64 people on the plane, 125 people in the Pentagon, and 5 hijackers.   

I accelerate;
move left, the fast lane,
tune in my lifeline, NPR—
Terrorists
Attack
New York City
American Airlines
Towers.
What's this about?

I hear it,
then see it play out before me—
silver capsule
red letters
darting through the sky,
too fast, too low, the wrong way,
sharply veering.

Metal meets concrete,
strikes without warning.
The nightmare of a soldier-
a burst of orange,
cloud of black
gray is swallowed.
A mighty wound,
gaping hollowness
cannot be touched.
Steel, rubber, metal,
grind to a halt.

I'm not alone,
they see it, too.
Hands clutch shaking heads,
people bewildered,
stopped in a place we do not belong.

I stand in the roadway,
reaching.
My heart floods with tears,
my eyes are dry.
I shake with coldness,
my stomach burns.
I circle my car,
there is no safety in this place.

You are with them,
whoever they are,
I cannot know them,
they are gone.
Nameless to me—
mothers
fathers
children
sisters
brothers
lovers.

You call them by name;
call them by name!
Have mercy,
deliver them from evil.
They are dust,
to dust they return.

Give me a balm
to heal my sinsick heart.

- The Rev. Gena D. Adams-Riley, Revised September 2011

Pictured: A steel bench from the Pentagon Memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

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Tags: 911, gena adams-riley, poetry, september 11

Earthquake Update

by the Rev. Kate Jenkins

A 5.8 magnitude earthquake and its aftershocks. The looming threat of Hurricane Irene. We often hear about earth quakes in California and hurricanes devastating island nations, but these events are in far away places with other people. This week, we experienced that vulnerability first-hand in the aftermath of Tuesday's earthquake.  

To date, we have not heard of any parishioners that were hurt and the building had minimal staff at the time of the earthquake. Immediately afterward, St. Paul's Parish Administrator Mike Koschak (a former resident of California who has actually lived through a number of earthquakes) did a thorough review of the church and parish house with the sextons. They checked from roof to basement and found no sign of damage, structural or otherwise, that they could detect. The church bells were not even thrown off, which was pretty amazing. Not all churches have been as fortunate. The Diocese of Virginia issued this update about the impact of the earthquake throughout the diocese.  

This earthquake, so close to home, reminded me that this earth we walk upon daily is still in creation and there is a fragility to everything that we take for granted. I'm still digesting the experience, but the words of our Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori come to mind:    

"May we all be reminded that we live on a fragile earth, in continual process of creation and destruction, and that we share a common responsibility for healing wherever  we are able." 

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Tags: creation, earthquake, hurricane

Word from Grace Street: Objectivity v. Mystery

Posted by Kimberly Allen

In this week's Word from Grace Street, Wallace+ shares part of an interview with physician and author Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen. Dr. Remen recalls the case of a man riddled with cancer whose lesions disappeared without any discernible explanation:

Dr. Remen remembers the medical staff's reaction, "Now, were we in awe? Certainly not. We were frustrated. Obviously, someone had misdiagnosed him."

An intensive study of the case ensued, with expert opinion solicited from around the country. The conclusion of that inquiry was that the chemotherapy that had been discontinued eleven months earlier had suddenly had a delayed effect.

"The embarrassing part of the story," recalls Dr. Remen, "is that I believed this for the next 15 years."

"What do you think now?," asked her interviewer.

"I think that that was one of the purest encounters with mystery that I have ever had in my life. It makes me wonder about who we are, what's possible for us, how this world really operates. I have no answers, but I have a lot of questions. And those questions have helped me to live better than any answers I might find."

Click here to read the full interview on Krista Tippett's "Speaking of Faith."

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Tags: american public media, krista tippett, word from grace street

The Angel Says, Make Way

Posted by Wallace+

That every person walking the earth, and every person who has ever been, was and is created to show the world the Divine nature. To show all people what love is. To show what mercy is. What kindness and generosity are.

That we all represent God.

That we are all God's own emissaries.

Of course we forget this sometimes. We forget it, about others.

And we forget this about ourselves.

And so God sends a messenger, (angelos, in Greek), to remind us, "Make way..."

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Tags: word from grace street

Word from Grace Street: More Light Than Darkness

Posted by Wallace+

"The Gospels were written by simple men who earnestly and with a miraculous eloquence tried to report events which they themselves had never witnessed but of which they had been told.  Even what these writers of hearsay set down we have never seen in the words they used, but only in the later Greek translations.  Consequently the narratives of the four Evangelists as we read them are full of misunderstandings and contradictions and inaccuracies--as every lawyer knows any human testimony aiming at truth is sure to be--yet they throw more light than darkness on the heart-shaking story they tell.  They are pitifully human and misleading, but drenched in a supernal light and their contagion changed the dreaming world." -- William Alexander Percy (1885-1942) 

Will Percy was many things: a memoirist; a poet, with a hymn text to his credit (see The Hymnal 1982, Hymn 661); a lawyer; a planter; and the adoptive father to three of his younger cousins, one of whom was the novelist Walker Percy.

He was also a person of deep, and deepening, faith.  In time, Percy grew beyond many of the conventions of the Roman Catholic faith in which he had been raised.  Nevertheless, to the end, his faith was at the core of his life and, indeed, his being.

The passage above comes from a chapter in Percy's memoir Lanterns on the Levee.  The chapter is entitled "For the Younger Generation."  In that chapter, he, essentially, relays to his young cousins his faith and his hope.  His hope for them, and his hope for the world.

More light than darkness.  The heart-shaking story.  Drenched in supernal light.  The contagion that changed--and changes--the dreaming world.

Changed.  And changes.

Amen, amen, amen.

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Tags: walker percy, william alexander percy, word from grace street

John Stott, Gracious Evangelical: Rest in Peace

Posted by Wallace+

Thursday's NYT obituary, and Sunday's column by Nicholas Kristof, reflecting on the life, ministry, and leadership of the Reverend John "Uncle John" Stott, are well worth reading. Kristof's piece is golden.

I had the opportunity to meet Stott, and hear him teach, several years ago in Birmingham, Alabama. Reading about him now makes me all the more grateful for that privilege.

May he rest in peace.

Pictured: Photo by Richard Perry, The New York Times. The Rev. John Stott at Trinity Church in Manhattan in 2006. Mr. Stott exerted influence largely through his many books.

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Tags: evangelical, john stott, new york times, nicholas kristof

‘A Friedmanian Moment’

Posted by Wallace+

Rabbi Edwin Friedman, the late author and family systems therapist, has influenced countless people, among them legion upon legion of ordained ministers, across denominations and faiths.

Friedman wrote and taught about how human systems operate, be it a nuclear family, a nation, a baseball team, or an order of monks, providing deep and often witty insight for those interested in improving the health (the functioning) of those systems.

A very Friedmanian moment, from one of his lectures (a recording of which a friend passed along to me), has stayed with me for years: The rabbi remarked upon how, in many churches, people put up with a lot of unkind and unpleasant behavior out of a vague notion that it would be "un-Christian" to confront those behaving poorly. And, indeed, the rabbi continued, often in synagogues, people are unwilling to hold one another accountable for comparably bad behavior, out of the very same vague notion that it would be "un-Christian" to do so.

We get the rabbi's irony, right?

Of course there is no real community, be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or otherwise, without, among other things of course, accountability. Compassionate accountability, yes; but, nonetheless, accountability just the same.

In a word, the un-Christian thing is not to hold one another accountable.

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Tags: accountability, rabbi edwin friedman, word from grace street

Word from Grace Street: Ego Holiday

Posted by Wallace+

What would it be like to give our egos the day off? (I know my ego could use a day off.)

An ego holiday! What do you say?!

And what are we going to do to celebrate?!

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Tags: ego, word from grace street