When I was beginning my work at the Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta, I was gifted by the imposition of a structure, something that was new to me. It came in the form of the Daily Office, that is, prayers to start the day, and prayers at the end of the day.

The Anglican version of the monastic life was transposed by Thomas Cramner into two times of daily prayer as opposed to the eight offices in a Benedictine monastery. For people who were not cloistered within the confines of a monastery, how might they find and observe a structure that kept them focused? Cramner came up with a natural rhythm: the Daily Office, Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer.

I consider myself so blessed to have landed at the Cathedral at such a formative time in my ministry. We had Morning Prayer every morning at 8:30 and Evening Prayer at 5:30. It provided a structure that would become my pattern of life throughout my career as a priest. With all the urgency, interruptions, and vicissitudes of life, having some structure was amazingly helpful to a young priest.

I got into a habit of going to a local gym around 6:30 in the morning to play racketball for 45 minutes, work out in the weight room for thirty, steam room for 15, shower and get to the Cathedral by 8:15. I could get to Mikell Chapel by 8:30 to join the Bishop and my fellow Canons for Morning Prayer. That was followed by coffee in the kitchen as we checked in for the day. I can’t imagine a better way for me to get centered in my new life at the Cathedral. It felt monastic to me in many ways, a true rule of life. To be there, often with my bishop, and my colleagues was a profound way to get my day off to a good start. “Coffee hour” is a liturgical “hour’ in the Episcopal tribe.

Having a community certainly helps. Since leaving the Cathedral, my Daily Office is more of a self-discipline, and more difficult to maintain. Over the last three years, it has become a part of my “rule” as a Franciscan, praying the office, reading the lections from scripture, and praying my intercessory prayers for fellow Franciscans and for those on my heart. My original rhythm of Morning and Evening Prayer, instilled at the Cathedral, with the aid of a supportive community, laid a foundation for me now that I am solitary. I am grateful and often think back to those days in Mikell Chapel with Bishop Judson Child, Herb Beadle, David Chamberlain, Bruce Shortell, and Lloyd Wells. I miss that community.

As we move into Lent, a time of self-reflection and amendment of life, let me ask you to pause and reflect on how you begin your day? Do you have certain rituals that form the start of your daily work, activities that form a structure that supports you? For me, it has changed as I have more freedom in my life with less demanding tiime commitments. I am able to extend my centering/meditation time, lingering in silence. When I was on the island, I would often spend long periods of time on my deck which was adjacent to the marshes of Glynn, listening to and watching the wildlife, mainly the birds. I felt as if it was a gift given to me as I moved into a more intentional focus on our Creation and our stewardship of it. Now, living by the Chattahoochee River, I watch and listen to the geese and ducks make their morning flights across my sky. I have three particular trees that I feel a connection to, one a magnolia, one a towering conifer that reaches skyward, and one wispy tree that poses in front of my window. It’s the wispy one that I am currently in conversation with as it is bereft of leaves, but in winter, waiting. I identify with her.

In my quiet time, I am aware of my connection to the Creation in a way that is fresh and new, even though I have always enjoyed being in nature, bathing if you will in the majesty of the mountain, enjoying the waves of the sea, resting in the lull of the lake. But now, things feel different. Less active, more connective.

My mornings are sacred as I set aside, dedicate time for journaling, which is intended for no one other than myself. I can write thoughts and feelings that I do not have to censor or worry about reaction, just free-form thoughts as they bubble to the surface. What a gift that is, no longer concerned about the political ramifications of what I might say, who I might piss off. After years of “positioning” for acceptance and consensus, how liberating it is to allow a free flow of thoughts. I laughingly remember a phrase that was applied to my grandmother, the salty Glennie Mae McBrayer, who was said to “call a spade a bloody hoe”. It got her into trouble here and there, and I know that I received a gene or two from that Scots line of McBrayer. I am sure that many former parishioners and friends may be surprised to even think that I paused to consider the effects of my remarks, but God knows, I did. Journaling releases me from the plague of an audience that I must play to. I commend journaling to those of you who have not tried it or left it behind in your past. It can be liberating…and revealing.

I also have adopted a discipline of writing every day. At times, this may be an article on coaching, the work that I am doing with young priests and ministers mostly. Or perhaps my time is directed at leadership or organizational development. Truth is, this is my best time, the time that I end feeling satisfied, as if I am doing what my Creator intended for me to do. It is always a gift, even in tough times when it is a struggle to dig out the words from my heart. It is a strange joy as I am in process, searching for words, phrases, images, but a deep sense of satisfaction when I complete. like any physical activity of desire and completion. On the other hand, there are those days when the wrongly attributed quote of Hemingway feels true about the work of writing: you just sit down at your typewriter, open a vein, and bleed. As my patron saint, St. Ringo truly said, “It don’t come easy.”.

As you are moving through your time of Lent, ask yourself as to the rituals that help to order your life.

Are there certain ways that you bring to your day?

Are there discernable patterns in the course of the day that you may or may not be aware of as you go through it?

Are there typical ways that you close your day, ending it in certain patterns?

These structures provide the lines on the field of play on which we live, move, and have our being. It’s worth the venture, every so often, to examine how we are living this one precious life as the ordering provides a structure that is, in fact, a container in the chaotic thing known as existence.

Growing up, there were five days of school, measured, meeted out, demanded. Free time limited. Saturday was free form but Sunday always meant Church. That was my structure growing up. It was outwardly imposed, socially accepted.

Nowdays, there is little imposition. It’s mostly all chosen, which can be good or bad.

My question for this week in Lent: how are you choosing to structure your life?

Rediscovering Thurman at the beginning of what promises to be a chaotic year feels somewhat providential, which is saying a lot for one who is reticent to ascribe such causal connections.

But here it is. Last week, I wrote of a Thurman conference that restored me to the deep waters of Howard Thurman’s soul. Our time together was initiated by the reading of one of my favorite Thurman pieces, How Good to Center Down, a reflection included in his book, Meditations of the Heart. This prompted (providentially?) me to pick up my copy, which led me (providentially?) to choose it as my Lenten reading.

I began my Lent a little early by spending five days focussed on that one meditation, finding it so rich, so ripe with insights into the spiritual life that I have aspired to, and striven for almost fifty years. “Centering” has been the main motif of my prayer life as my tendency to get distracted and scattered has been a constant issue.

For me, it began in college with a “quick trip” to the Transcendental Meditation center, seeking to find focus for my academic studies. Honestly, I was looking for the proverbial “edge” in the competitive environment that I found myself in with people who had been better prepared for that rigor. And the TM mantra, made cool by the Beatles, promoted by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was effective, measured by the rise in my GPA, the gold standard.

About a year later, a trip to visit the Trappist monastery just outside of Atlanta bumped me into a renewed method of prayer called Centering Prayer. Like TM, it used a prayer phrase, a mantra, to regulate your breathing so that you could focus on the presence of God. The monks and the writings of Trappist monks in Spencer, Massachusetts, were appealing as it baptized my practice of meditation, connecting it with God.

I wrote last week of my tranfigurative encounter with Thurman which added another dimension to the mix. Dr. Thurman prescribed the use of an ancient method, unknown to me at the time, lectio divina. It simply, and profoundly entails the reading of scripture in a meditative mode, reading the text slowly, as Bernard of Clairvaux admonishes, “masticating” or chewing on the words rather than rushing through the text. As I said last week, Thurman offered up Psalm 139 for my “mastication” which seemed prescient to me. It has continued to be my “go-to” in times of press and stress. Trappist monks use lectio in their choir chant, going through all 150 Psalms in a month’s time.

However one chooses to “center” one’s Self is a good thing. For me, it usually means a time of being in the presence of God, as outside distractions are put aside. One of the things I learned from Tibetan Buddhism was our tendency to have a “monkey mind” with the image of monkeys jumping from tree to tree. That sounded just about right when I was learning another “centering” style of meditation at the Drepung Loseling Center here in Atlanta. What is needed is a method, a practical means to stop the monkeys, to settle down, to be present in the Eternal Now. Easier said than done, yelled the monkey as he jumped from the palm tree.

Thurman’s book, Meditation of the Heart, is chocked full of helpful images and practical advice around this notion of centering. I commend the book, available through Amazon (one day delivery…tell ’em Dave sent you). The article I began with, How Good To Center Down!, describes the situation/predicament well:

“How good it is to center down! To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by! The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic. Our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences, While something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment and the resting lull.”

Now, Thurman’s not using the monkey-tree image, but if you live in Atlanta, the traffic metaphor works pretty well. You get a sense of where we are in our lives, with information highway overload, demands on our energy and time, and the very lack of a “center”. He goes on:

“With full intensity we seek, ere the quiet passes, a fresh sense of order in our living; A direction, a strong sure purpose that will structure our confusion and bring meaning to our chaos.”

This is what Centering does. It allows us to pause. To simply be in the moment, without distraction. “To abide”, quoting the Dude.

In this particular essay, Thurman uses the centering process to set up a moment of self-reflection in the service of self-awareness. This press seemed particularly appropriate to the season of Lent as we examine ourselves, not to beat ourselves up, but to commit to amend and improve our way of being in the world as faithful stewards of our lives and the Creation that we share.

Let me give you a taste of how Thurman procedes here:

“We look at ourselves in this waiting moment- the kinds of people we are. The questions persist: what are we doing with our lives?- What are the motives that are ordering our days? What is the end of our doings? Where are we trying to go? Where do we put the emphasis and where are our values focused? For what end do we make sacrifices? Where is my treasure and what do I love most in life? What do I hate most in life and to what am I true?”

No simple survey question that beats against us in social media, like “who you gonna vote for?” and “will you contribute?”. These are existential questions that get to the heart of the matter. For me, this is not an everyday exercise, as my centering is more of a quieting, calming of my spirit. But in seasons such as this, Lent, or in evaluative moments at the end or beginning of a quarter, these questions deserve answers whether you have the brass to face them or not. Who are you? What are you intending to do with your precious life? What values are driving you? How are you doing? What changes, amendments, do you need to make in your life?

Thurman concludes with a sense of hope:

“Over and over the questions beat in upon the waiting moment. As we listen, floating up through all the jangling echoes of our turbulence, there is a sound of another kind-deeper note which only the stillness of the heart makes clear. It moves directly to the core of our being. Our questions are answered. Our spirits refreshed, and we move back into the traffic of our daily round, with the peace of the Eternal in our step. How good it is to center down.”

Transcendental Meditation (copyright TM), Centering Prayer, lectio divina, or Tibetan lovingkindness, they all are trying to get us to CENTER our Self in an awareness of this moment that we are gifted with, sharing with others. I hope you are finding this season of Lent as an oasis, or perhaps a desert, as you continue on in your journey in this life. I would value hearing if these questions of Thurman have prompted your reflection as they have me.

Blessings on your journey.+

The quotations here are from Howard Thurman’s, Meditations of the Heart, p. 12-13.

On the eve of the last Sunday of Epiphany, Transfiguration, I was gifted with a moment one might call a “revelation” by attending a seminar in Atlanta, featuring one of my teachers, Dr. Luther Smith of the Candler School of Theology.

It was a gathering around a significant figure of our time, Dr. Howard Thurman, reminding me of an epiphanic moment for me: a white boy from the Southside of Atlanta encountering this historic, mystic, prophet giant as I was just launching my voyage on the ocean of the Spirit.

Today, this particular conference began with a viewing of a documentary on the life of Dr. Thurman, Backs Against the Wall, a stirring presentation of his journey as the spiritual mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr. . Thurman served as the spiritual center behind the civil rights movement, as well as a prophet of a new way of synthetic thinking around the issue of faith, bringing multiple faith traditions together. You should take the time to watch it, by searching the production company, http://www.journeyfilms.com. My old friend, Barbara Brown Taylor, is winsomely cast as a witness to Thurman’s profound power.

I found the Saturday morning event moving, both by the documentary, and later with the dialogue between Luther Smith and Walter Fluker, both scholars in the stuff of Thurman. What a gift they were with their incisive insights into Thurman’s genius and spirit.

My transfigurative “mountain top” experience was produced by my preaching professor, Dr. Joe Roberts, senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Sweet Auburn Ave. in downtown Atlanta. He sported a Ph. D. from Princeton and brought his full academic weight to the dance when I experienced him as my professor of preaching at Emory’s Candler School of Theology.

I was lucky, fortunate, blessed…smart, when he and I connected in that classroom, with him giving me some very practical advice and points in terms of how to preach effectively. I used my notes from his lectures throughout my career of preaching and it served me well. Joe was the preacher’s preacher. He was often used, employed, paid, by Episcopalians in Atlanta to preach on Good Friday as we correctly discerned that he knew a little bit about the suffering of Jesus on the cross, an oppressed person, something that was hard for a privileged white person to comprehend. We preferred a success story as opposed to the Suffering Servant. Still do.

Joe grabbed me after class one day and said that he wanted me to meet a friend of his. The name of the person was Howard Thurman. I am embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of him. Joe explained a bit about his background, told me that he was to be delivering the baccalaureate address at Spellman College, and that I could meet with him that morning beforehand. As Joe was encouraging me, coaching me, I remember him laughing, which made me nervous. He said that I might find him out on the quad talking to a tree. I had no idea what the joke was, but Joe’s admonition to meet this guy was more than enough to get my attention.

I met Howard Thurman at Atlanta University Center in a classroom. There were no trees in the room that I could discern. He asked me to tell him my story. His face had the folds of age in it, bloodhound eyes that drooped signaling sadness, though his bright smile and infectious laughter tilted against the wind of the mood. We talked for hours, about Jesus, the church, the times, the task of ministry, and the source of courage. I summoned the courage to ask him about prayer. He must have read my mail for he prescribed, like a doctor, a prescription of reading, slowly, deliberately, pausingly Psalm 139. He said, center yourself and allow the words of the psalm to float in your soul.. Pause. Ponder. Wait on the meaning of the words to grasp you, grab you. Don’t rush. Linger. “Hang”…I’ll always remember that one word that caught me… “hang with the words in your soul.”.

Howard gave me my marching orders over the next few months to read Psalm 139 prayerfully each day once if not twice. This particular psalm was perfectly selected for my inner spiritual trauma (you can read my December posts to get an inside insight on this point). I was instructed to check in with him monthly by phone, which I did. At the end of each call, I would ask him if I should move on to another Psalm for my meditation. Each month, he would say, “No. Stick with 139.”. After four months, I got the courage to ask Obi-Wan if this was going to continue, and Thurman laughed, “For at least a year.”. Lesson learned. Got it. A Thurmanian mind trick.

One other note. When I attended that Spelman baccalaureate service later, I was struck by Thurman’s ascending into the pulpit of the chapel, as he closed his eyes, and held a silence for what seemed to me to be a century. Then, slowly, oh so slowing, he began to recite the opening lines of Psalm 139, to mark the beginning of his address. Word.

Thurman’s works are read in enclaves throughout the Christian landscape. He is still a bit too radical, meaning “close to Jesus” for most conventional Christians. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, of my Episcopal tribe, made Thurman’s seminal and provocative book, Jesus and the Disinherited, the centerpiece of the transformational process, Sacred Ground, in the Episcopal program confronting racism. It gets at the reality and history of what it has meant to have “your back against the wall” in this country and made powerful and profound suggestions as to how to make one’s way through this plight.

In this book, Thurman tells a story of his grandmother who was enslaved slave for part of her life. She recounted how her owner would invite his preacher to come in once a year to preach from the Bible as to how slave should be subject to their masters, reinforcing this horrific practice of slavery by using the Bible. However, secretly, there would be a once-a-year sermon from a free black preacher, who would always wind up his sermon with the powerful and incendiary words: You are not slaves, you are not niggers, you are God’s children!

His grandmother drove that home in her beloved Howard, establishing the personal dignity that goes along with one’s birth. This provided an immunization against the virulant attacks of the culture on self-worth. “The individual now feels that he counts, he belongs.”. His grandmother’s lessons seemed to have planted deep roots in Thurman’s soul.

If you call yourself a Christian, you owe it to yourself, and to Jesus, to read Thurman’s book., Jesus and the Disinherited. I double-dog-dare-you to find the courage to tackle this text which is thoroughly biblical and yet so radical that it will leave your head spinning and set your soul on fire. It’s the book that Martin King carried with him in his briefcase, along with his Bible.

As I head into the forty days of Lent, I feel inspired by Howard Thurman to take Jesus even more seriously. I am walking into this desert with a copy of Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited, Michael Curry’s Love is the Way, and the Gospels. I have several of Thomas Merton’s books by my side as well. I am jazzed to dive deeply into this Lent, grateful to my friend, Luther Smith, for the gift of remembering my own transfigurative moment on the top of a mountain in Atlanta.

Blessings on you in your Lenten journey.+

My first liturgical job at the Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta was to wipe ashes. I am exercising Herculean restraint by not making a cute, clever additional comment to this opening that involves “kissing”. You’re welcome, Mother.

Here’s the story. I had been hired to serve as the Lay Pastoral Assistant as I was transitioning from my pastoral work in a major South of God congregation where Jimmy Carter hung out. From that high calling to wiping ashes.

Truth is, I was thrilled to be asked by the long-time Dean of the Cathedral, David Collins, to take on this job. It was my first liturgical work as an Episcopalian. The occasion was Ash Wednesday. At four services on that auspicious day that begins the season of Lent, leading to Holy Week and Easter, the faithful gather to participate in a rigorous act of penitence followed by the imposition of ashes.

For those of you unfamiliar with such things, the ashes are prepared by the clergy weeks in advance, burning the palm fronds that were used in the previous year’s Palm Sunday. My boss, Canon Herb Beadle, was meticulous in his torching and grinding of the ashes, carefully preparing this gray/black mixture for a proper imposition. No store-bought ashes for us.

At the midpoint of the service, the congregation is invited to come forward to the communion rail, to kneel, while the priests come by and impose the ashes on one’s forehead. The priest does this with her/his thumb in the shape of a cross while repeating the powerful words, “Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.”. How’s that for a blast of reality? And yet people line up on Ash Wednesday for the annual ritual of the imposition, which it is, of our inescapable mortality.

So where does wiping ashes come in? To be honest, St. Philip’s Cathedral is the only place I have seen this practice in the Episcopal Church. Normally, there is no wiping of ashes. They impose the ashes, and leave them be as the people return to their businesses and homes. But not in my early days at the Cathedral. Dean Collin had a designated “ash wiper” following each priest, with a towel to wipe the tell-tale residue from the forehead. I do not know this as a fact but I assumed then and now that it was in response to an admonition by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, not to make a public show of your piety. In Matthew Chapter 6, Jesus is quoted warning his disciples not to make a show of their charity or fasting. In verse 17, he specifically says to “wash your face” so that folks will not know that you are engaged in a fasting practice of devotion. You are doing this for God, not for the public. I assume Dean Collins led the charge on this although I was not privy to his thought at that time. And, that practice was “gone with the wind” after Dean Collins’ retirement at the Cathedral.

As I said, I never saw it again in my time as a parish priest. I did not practice it, though I thought about it at each Ash Wednesday service I participated in or led. I think Dean Collins’ instinct was good on this spiritually as I sometimes sense a perverse pride in folks who seem to be parading their mark of penitence with declaritive ashes. Perhaps, we should installl stations at the back of the church, with handi-wipes, so that the faithful can intentionally follow Jesus’ admonition of not being showy with one’s piety. Wiping ashes. It was my entry point, something I am pondering.

This year, Ash Wednesday occurs on Feb. 14th, Valentine’s Day. How odd. It’s one of my favorite liturgies of the Episcopal Church as the words that are spoken and the physical act of repentence are masterfully orchestrated. Strange to be hitched to such red cellophane, chocolate-covered, Hallmark-sponsored day.

The marking of the cross on the forehead follows the lines of one’s baptism, as the priest marks one’s forehead with holy oil, the oil of chrism, blessed by a bishop. There, at baptism, she/he reassures you, and your family, that you are marked as Christ’s own forever. As actor, Bill Murray would say in Caddyshack, “Nice. So I’ve got that going for me.”.

Later, in extremis, when you are in the hospital or on your death bed, the scented oil of chrism is used by the pastoral priest in re-minding you of your true indentity, as she/he marks the sign of the cross, again on your forehead while uttering those same words of affirmation, “you are marked as Christ’s own forever.” Having pastorally visited the dying in the hospital before becoming an Episcopal priest, I can not imagine a more powerful symbol to employ other than communion, which is not practical in certain situations., This is a basic reason that I have enjoyed being a sacramental Christian as the symbol works powerfully as we are symbolic creatures at heart. The human touch, the olfactory sense provided by the scent of the oil, the reassuring words…all partipate in the experiential grace of that moment of blessing.

But on this day, Ash Wednesday, the symbol is a stark reminder of our mortality, our brokeness, our fallibility. It takes your breath away if you choose to engage in the experiential reality of the moment….yes, I am going to die. I am broken. I have failed to live up to my potential. I have broken my vows. I am mortal. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

And yet, in the “midst” (a wonderful religious word that I remember pastors of my youth employing) of this confession, the Church invites us to communion, to share in the bliss of connection with God and the saints that have gone before us. You don’t have to fake it in order to make it. You can tell the truth about how broken you are and still receive the graceful love of a God who accepts you as you are, loves you in spite of yourself.

If you can experientially grab hold of that reality, you will have your moment of redemption, of salvation, of healing, of joy. It’s referred to in the Christian community as Grace… and it is amazing.

As we approach Ash Wednesday, I invite you to venture into the waters of this sacramental event. If you are new to the practice, just sit near the back and observe the event. You will quickly catch on. There will be ushers there to prompt your coming forward, and you merely, and profoundly, need to make your Self present by kneeling before the altar, inviting this imposition on your consciousness and into your awareness. Any Episcopal parish will have at least one Ash Wednesday service so you should be able to find a time to fit your schedule. Other denominations offer similar forms of an Ash Wednesday service as well. In my old South of God congregation, we offered an observance of Ash Wednesday. Just find one, and go. Then, let me know about your experience. I would value hearing how you think and feel about this event. How did you find it? How did it find you?

We are headed into the forty days of Lent. Ash Wednesday is powerful way to wade into these waters of renewal. And remember…you can wipe your own ashes. Blessings, y’all.

I was holding my new granddaughter, Harper, when the powerful image of “circle” flooded my mind. I noted it in last week’s article.

I’m certain that Lion King was lurking in my consciousness, with the image of Rafiki lifting up Simba as new evidence of life before us. It’s an image that used to come to me as a priest, lifting up a newly baptized infant heavenward to proclaim that life indeed continues. It goes on. This Circle of Life.

But later, driving back from the island, back to the cosmos of the city, the Circle captured me again, surprisingly, out of nowhere. Depressed by leaving my favorite place, and now, my favorite grandchild (only grandchild), my spirit took me to an old memory from forty years ago. It was to a moment of being captured by a song, written and performed by one of my favorite troubadours, Harry Chapin.

I was exposed to the storytelling genius of Harry during my senior year in high school with his break-out song, Taxi. The melancholy/romantic mix captured me at my first hearing of his love-lost tale and I was hooked for life. The funny story is that he debuted the song on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and it impressed Carson so much that for the first time in the history of the show, he invited Harry to return the next night for an encore performance. I can’t imagine a better way to launch a career.

I became a fan and tried to catch Harry in concert every time he came to Atlanta, several times at the Fox Theater, a magical venue that only enhanced his spell over me. In 1974, he wrote the now-standard Cat’s in the Cradle, a moral lesson on how we raise our children while in the fast lane. He produced a number of albums with a variety of story-based songs, again with implied life lessons within the lyrics.

The song that flashed back in my mind during my return trip came from his second album, oddly named Sniper and Other Love Songs. “Circle” is less a story song, but rather a seat-of-the-pants philosophy lyric:

All my life’s a circle, Sunrise and sundown, Moon rolls through the nighttime, Till the daybreak come around.

All my life’s a circle, But I can’t tell you why, Season’s spinning round again, The years keep rollin’ by.

It seems like I’ve been here before, I can’t remember when; But I have this funny feeling, that we’ll all be together again.

No straight lines make up my life, And all my roads have bends; There’s no clear-cut beginnings, and so far no dead-ends.

I found you a thousand times, I guess you done the same; But then we lose each other, it’s like a children’s game.

As I find you here again, a thought runs through my mind; Our love is like a circle, let’s go ’round one more time.

All my life’s a circle, Sunrise and sundown, Moon rolls through nighttime, Till the daybreak comes around.

All my life’s a circle, But I can’t tell you why, Seasons spinning round again, the years keep rollin’ by.

The lyric was both soothing and haunting as I made my way past Darien, all the way back to Atlanta as it replayed repeatedly in my mind. There is this underlying sense of connection to a deeper process than my mere twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week existence. The genetics has a particular and peculiar power for me, given my own story. This tiny child is bearing my genetic strain, my DNA, whatever that is, into the future of this planet, even after I make my exit. Her new presence on the Earth reminds me of my place in the chain of life that both extends back into Scottish history and forward into whatever evolves in this world. It’s an astonishing “feel” of being a part of something so much larger, a sense of awe that’s hard to get a whiff of these days. It was both exhilarating and humbling as I held this bundle of new life on the scene. Had I been alone with her, I would have probably succumbed to my dramatic temptation to lift her up, playing Rafiki in this transposed island scene.

I look at her and wonder: where will she go? What will she do with her one precious life? What dreams swirl in her soul? Where will the heart of her passion reside? What will call her to follow? What obstacles lie ahead? What heartbreaks? Where will she find her joy? What meaning will she make of this thing we call existence? I found myself pondering those things as I quietly held her and looked at her face, her hands, her twisting body, her searching eyes. And I find myself thrust into a deep sense of gratitude for this gift that has been given, this miracle of life that has found its way into this particular and peculiar space and time. “Amazed” is the word. And then, I find myself praying a quiet prayer for her, for her health, for her safety, for her emerging sense of self. Harper. My granddaughter by the water.

And on the drive back, the Circle song of Harry Chapin edges its way into my consciousness, reminding me of my part in all of this. My aging has been made more apparent lately, forcing me to face my diminished physical dexterity. Single-handing a sailboat is no longer in my deck of cards. Hell, I’m just lucky not to trip and fall these days, a fate that scares the hell out of me. Age has slowed me down, which has hidden blessings in terms of focusing my attention on things that I was often too distracted to attend to. I am more aware of nature than ever before in spite of my difficulty in getting immersed, baptized in it. I find myself paying attention to the seasons, the changes in the flora, and the various trees that surround me. There is a tree outside my office window that speaks to me daily. I am reading more intentionally, more selectively, sensing the limits of my time, my own finititude, which was once an interesting word to play with in my writing. It is now ever before me and yet I vow to not allow it to hamper my zest for life.

I stand at the end of my circle, while Harper is just getting started on hers. Having had way too many classmates die early, prompting me to realize how precious life is, I consider myself blessed to have lived this long. I emerged from that early encounter with death with an earned degree of appreciation for the fragility of life as well as a passion to live whatever days given to me with a passion,, or as my first boss, Dr. Bill Lancaster told me, “you have to live it every day1”. Indeed.

I dodged a bullet with a quad bypass fifteen years ago. My Emory classmate, Dr. Omar Latouf, an immigrant from Jordan, and devout Muslim, saved my ass with an emergency beating heart/open heart surgery. Piece of cake, he said smiling. My friend, Dan Reeves, who had the same procedure a few years earlier, intervened in my post-op depression, assuring me that this radical piece of surgery that cracked my chest open would give me a new lease on life, with more energy than before…and he was right on the money. In moments such as this, which my pastoral care mentor, Dr. Chuck Gerkin, told me are known as “tight spaces”, that is, when you look finitude square in the eye, no denial is possible. Strangely, for me, those tight spaces quicken my pulse and pace.

Erik Erikson, my original psychoanalytic theorist, analyzed the human life cycle in terms of development. His ground-breaking, Childhood and Society, notes the first and last stages of life. The first stage is that of trust vs. mistrust. This is what Harper is messing with now in her first experience of life on this planet. Is the world trustworthy?, she, and every child, asks experientially. Will I be cared for, will I be fed, will I be nurtured? This question is answered in the matrix of the family, with a mother who nurses, feeds, holds, and cleans and a father and caregivers who add to that primal bond. With a sense of being cared for and thus worthy, she will emerge from infancy funded with a trust that will carry her through the vicissitudes of life.

The last stage in the human life cycle Erikson calls integrity vs. despair. If one is fortunate to have a long life, one is natively drawn into a process known as a life review. One looks back over the course of one’s life to see if there is a sense of integrity to the life that you have lived. Is there a thread of meaning that runs through the core of one’s life, a sense of meaningful trajectory that arcs through the stuff of your years? If there is, Erikson says that one ends life with a sense of hope. That’s good news for those who have been guided by some organizing principle, some commitment to something that is bigger than one’s self. But there is the ever-present tension, a dialectic if you will. If in that life review, that thread of meaning has been frayed, or missing, one is caught with a sense of despair. In my work with elders when I was just a pup, I noted that Erikson had it exactly right, as suicide, intentional or not, is pervasive. And to keep the balance in the air spinning, so is joy. It is not determined at birth. It is made as we live our lives.

Which brings me to one more Harry Chapin song to close this piece. Harry wrote the music to a play he was working on before he tragically died in 1981, Cotton Patch Gospel. It was based on the imaginative work of Clarence Jordan, a South of God New Testament scholar, who founded an interracial community in south Georgia, near Jimmy Carter’s Plains. Jordan took the Gospels and transposed the story from Israel to Georgia. Jesus grows up in Gainesville, is baptized in the Chattahoochee instead of the Jordan, and goes high-tailing into Atlanta as opposed to Jerusalem. I literally grew up reading Jordan’s Cotton Patch translation as it helped me make Jesus real in my own Southern culture. I have his two volumes sitting here on my desk and they get read daily.

Chapin took the narrative and Southern idiom and penned songs for this play/musical. Tom Key wrote and produced it for the Alliance Theater which brought out record crowds in Atlanta. If you are interested, a DVD of a recorded performance is available. Tell them Dr. David sent you…commission, you know.

The final song of the play expresses the spirit of Harry, and captures my own deepest intuition about the contours of life. It speaks of a zestful hope for how one might spend one’s days, and has emerged as a theme song for me, particularly in times of question. I hope, one day, Harper will listen to her granddad’s song. It is written as an epigraph on Harry’s tombstone in Huntington, New York.

“Oh if a man tried, To take his time on Earth, And prove before he died, What one man’s life could be worth, I wonder what would happen to this world?”

Indeed. Blessings, y’all.

Her name is Harper.

Harper Jones Giery. Arrived on Friday, January 19th at 4:41 AM in Brunswick, Georgia. By the “marshes of Glynn”. A profound place of origin, primordial waters. Shared by indigenous people, English explorers and colonists, plantation and slave owners, Gullah Geechee people, wintering industrialists, and the present gumbo mix of folks that make up America. Tasty. Into this rich soup comes my granddaughter, Harper.

She is my first grandchild, so this is new territory for me. Unfamiliar. Ponderous. Joyful.

I got a message from my daughter on Thursday afternoon that her “water broke”, an interesting folksy phrase, and that she had gone to the birthing center at the Brunswick hospital, but that it would probably be Friday before the birth. The text buzzed through as my regular Creative Interchange group was ending its meeting, I was able to have the joy of sharing my anticipatory news with my friends who share in my passion for Henry Nelson Wieman. It felt like a blessing in this moment to have a close community with which to share this Good News. They did not disappoint in their enthusiastic response.

I woke suddenly Friday morning at 4 AM, the time when the Trappist monks begin their daily prayers. I soon received a text message, heralding the birth of Harper. It came with a photo of my daughter, Mary Glen, holding Harper. MG looks joyful, surprised, and scared at the same time….which means she was in touch with reality. A new life has been conceived, formed, developed, and now emerged from her body. Her life will never be the same. Ask me how I know this.

I remember Mary Glen’s own birth, emerging from her mother late one Sunday afternoon in July. It was my second time witnessing this miracle of birth up close and personal. Having had a son in our first go-round, I was praying for a girl. Steve, my close friend and my wife’s ObGyn, let me get in the strike zone to really observe the entrance of my daughter, to see her crown, to watch her emerge from her amniotic water cocoon. I remember exclaiming (Episcopal) and shouting (South of God), “There’s NO penis!”, so happy that our hopes had come true. After the umbilical cord was cut, and she was secured, I left the birthing room to greet my parents and my wife’s parents, and said simply, ” I got my girl!”. It was one of the great moments of joy in my life.

But here came another one.

My daughter handed Harper to me yesterday and let me hold her. Sweet. Looking at her face, her hand movement, her body shifts. It was…. surreal. It launched me into a reverie of memories when this new mother was being held by me in Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. That baby would cry whenever she was not held. Insistently. The image of “circle” invaded my awareness.

Memories of my daughter’s journey flooded my consciousness.

We baptized Mary Glen at the Cathedral on my last day as a priest there, with Dean John Sanders officiating. At three months, she left Atlanta with us, bound, not in covered wagon, for Texas where she would spend her first ten years of life. She was a baby doll, with a winsome personality. “Sassy” was a word that was bandied about, as aligning her with her Texas great grandmother Glennie Mae McBrayer, who was a force of nature and who introduced me to my Texas roots when I was a child.

Watching Mary Glen develop was a joy. She made friends easily, establishing long-time friends in Texas, in Atlanta while in high school, in Athens during college, and then on St. Simons Island as she began her work career following college. She is natively kind, with a natural empathy for those around her. She recently trained and is tutoring children that are dyslexic, following her mother’s gift and passion for teaching. To say that I am proud of her is a massive understatement.

It was interesting watching her find a mate for life. She had been everyone’s friend but had never settled down with one person. After college, she met Michael, who grew up here on the island and whose family has been deeply connected to this land for generations. As a father, you pray that your child will find the right person who will join them as a partner in this adventure of life. I think my daughter did just that. It felt appropriate, in the middle of the Covid lockdown, for us to gather family for the exchange of vows literally on the edge of my beloved marshes of Glynn.

And so, they now move into a new chapter of life that will be challenging and promising. How to maintain balance between work and family? How to keep one’s sense of identity when developing the deep connections of family? How does one tend to professional development while taking care of the business of family? There are the tasks that face a person who dares to bring a child into this rapidly changing world. It is daunting work, but worthy of a life.

Watching Harper open her eyes, scanning the room from left to the right, having her attention caught by something, then moving on, I am reminded that she is in full-tilt discovery mode. That’s the way we are wired, our DNA, prompting the beginnings of awareness. She senses her hand, moves it to her mouth, seemingly shocked by its presence. Her facial expressions morph quickly…is that a smile? The swaddling blanket seems to convey a sense of security, held safe. My wife spends hours holding her as my daughter gets some much-needed sleep between feedings. What a dance this is. A joyful dance of connection.

This is a precious time for Harper. As we watch her make her entrance onto the stage of life, we are gifted, blessed by observing her aimless exploration of this world in which she now finds herself, even now beginning to make sense of what it’s all about. Is this world trustworthy? Can I count on it to meet my needs? Am I worthy? What in the world am I doing here on the planet as it circles the sun in my first year of rotation?

It’s a never-ending quest for meaning until we die, although for some it happens before we expire physically. We cease our spirit of exploration and discovery. We settle for the comfort of the known, the familiar. Exploration takes energy, nerve, courage. But for Harper, freshly launched, she is taking it all in, the windfall of her birth, the gift of life, the wonder of existence.

That, in fact, is the heart of our prayer at the baptism of an infant in the Episcopal Church. The closing prayer expresses the deep desire of the faithful community gathered around the font of holy life-giving water, reminding us of the primordial waters of Creation, and the waters from which we emerged in the womb. We pray for this one who is joining us in the walk and way of Christ to be sustained by the Holy Spirt. The prayer gets wonderfully specific as we pray, implore that God give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and persevere, a spirit to know and love God, and the gift of joy and wonder in all of God’s works.

Those words are so powerful to me, expressing the intention of human being in the world. It’s truly what we want, desire for any person who breathes air and walks this Earth. It brings me up short everytime I pray the prayer at a baptism for it succinctly expresses the spirit of life that moves us., connects us, enlivens us, animates us.

And now, even before any such formal ritual, my heart and spirit seems to be praying this prayer for Harper, my granddaughter by the water. Brave journey.

It’s the season of Epiphany.

Many folks are unaware of the day of Epiphany, even though they trot out the Wise Men and can recite the non-returnable gifts they brought to the party.

In the Church calendar, Epiphany follows the warm, cozy scene of Baby Jesus cooing quietly in the manger, cute, with no demands, much less than the demands he would make on those that would follow him later. His unique birth was noted by the astrologers coming from afar to present gifts to the special one. The birth narrative of Jesus in the Gospel according to Matthew moves fast and furiously…and briefly.

Joseph is warned in a dream of Herod’s murderous intent of killing any potential usurpers of his power, having been hipped by the Wise Men to this heralded One birthed prophetically in Bethlehem. So the trio, Joseph, Mary, and baby leave for Egypt to hide out. Herod issues a decree to kill all the male children in Bethlehem, these poor infants who were rightly named the Holy Innocents, Herod eventually dies, and again an angel is the messenger to Joseph, informing him that it is safe to return to Israel, specifically to Nazareth.

“Jesus: The Missing Years” would serve as a good tagline for the lack of information in Jesus’ development between the end of Chapter 2 and the straightway beginning of Chapter 3 with the introduction of John the Baptizer. I would remind you that there is NO infancy narrative whatsoever in the first written Gospel, Mark, as he jumps straight into the appearance of John. The early church was focused on the Passsion, the death and resurrection of Jesus, not his birth.

The Gospel of Luke has the most extensive narrative that introduces most of the characters we see in the traditional Christmas plays. The Gospel of John skips the birth narrative, offering instead a rather cosmic philosophical entry that reflects a Greek influence of Logos, or Word.

In Matthew, John is shown heralding/warning that the Kingdom of God is here. His word is “repent” and to take seriously the covenant that is at the heart of the Hebrew faith. The scene is set as John baptized Jesus in the primal Jordan River, and as Jesus comes up out of the river, dripping with water, Matthew records the signs that all point to this one from Nazareth as being the very manifestation of the Divine Presence in human form.

“Manifest”. That is what the Greek-derived word means, epiphany! God made manifest in this human being, Jesus. He is the epiphany of God. This one shows us what the Creator intended when this world was set in motion. Look to this Jesus if you are wanting to figure out the very meaning of life, the purpose of our being in the world.

So we are currently in the season of Epiphany in the church year. Let’s pause to review the sweep of time as the Church tries to provide a structure for our spiritual experience of this Christ.

The Church got something right here in the formation of our liturgical calendar. We begin with Advent, a period of preparation as we look to the horizon for the long-awaited hope that had been promised. The Advent season is punctuated by the birth of Jesus, the Feast of the Incarnation, in which God indwells in flesh, that is, no longer splitting the sacred and profane, spirit and flesh. Rather it is all One, connected. We celebrate the season of Christmas, the Twelve Days, which lead us to Epiphany.

Epiphany reminds us that this Jesus is the manifestation in his very being as to what God intended in this Creative Event. Look to him to take your cues as to how to live your own being in this world. While our recent culture trivialized this in four letters. WWJD, what would Jesus do?, they got it right in terms of where to look for answers as to our quest for faithfulness in living out our days on this planet.

Lent follows with a forty day period of deep reflection on what might get us, or have gotten us, off track. It is initiated by the powerful rubbing of our nose in our mortality, Ash Wednesday, in which we are reminded in the symbol of ashes, that we were formed of dust, birthed of dust, and to dust we shall return. In sacramental worship, the sign of the cross is traced in ashes on our foreheads as a re-minder of this existential reality…you are going to die. You are not immortal, there’s an expiration date on your body, the flesh in whom the Spirit is indwelling. As a priest leading God’s people in worship, there is probably no more powerful act that I ever performed, “imposing” the ashes in the form of a cross on the face of another human being. And it is an imposition.

I am reminded of that fact as I await the birth of my first grandchild. She will emerge from her mother’s womb, filled with promise and expectation. I anticipate that she, like her mother, will be baptized, with the mark of the cross, not in ashes but with holy oil, blessed by a bishop, as the celebrant will proclaim that she is “marked as Christ’s own forever”. That’s a high moment of recognition of her inherent worth, her value as a person. But even as that fact is proclaimed, in the shadow is the dialectical reality of Ash Wednesday, with the admonishment “you are dust, and to the dust you shall return”. Here, once again, is the profound creative tension that pervades our existence as Creatures in this Creation that connects us all.

From this Ash Wednesday, we move/fall into our time of Lent, forty days, just like Jesus spent in the wilderness being spiritually tested as to his commitment to this triadic covenant between God, neighbor, and self. Would he/you/me be tempted to exchange that primary commitment and loyalty to lesser “gods” such as power, wealth, or standing? I cherish the fact that the narrative of the temptation does not give Jesus a free pass, or in our day, a pardon. He, like any other human being, struggled through this valley, emerging with his own decision, his own choice. Jesus emerges from this desert experience to begin his ministry, eventually leading to Jerusalem, the very stage of his Passion.

And so after Lent, the Church in her wisdom places Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday and the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. Jesus rides into town, surrounded by hopes that he is the Messiah who has finally come to deliver his people from the captivity and oppression of the Romans. People are excited, churned up with hope and expectations, but they will be disappointed because Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom or Realm of God is not grand but humble, not based in power, but servanthood. That should sound familiar in our own day as folks still seem to look for power in their religion rather than a call to service. Nothing new under the sun, I’ve heard it said.

The Church brilliantly highlights the next week, Holy Week, recounting the events of that final week of Jesus’ ministry. Maunday Thursday with his last night with his disciples, gathered in a room for his final instructions. He transforms a basic Hebrew ritual of thanksgiving at a table meal, and institutes a means by which his disciples can re-member him with the blessing of bread and wine, common stuff, but life-giving in an arid environment. And, Jesus gives them another rite, a symbol of servanthood in the everyday act of washing of dusty desert feet. He, the Master, makes the pregnant point of being the servant, washing the feet of his disciples, teaching that this is the way of life he has taught and is leaving with them to follow. Curious that the Church chose to accentuate the fellowship meal, celebrating weekly on the Lord’s Day of Sunday while relegating the servant rite to a mere one day observance, a rite that is skipped by many due to a lack of convenience. That seems telling to me,

Good Friday reminds us of Jesus’ Passion on the Cross, recalling graphically his last words and his death. There is an invitation to empathetically enter into this scene on Calvary, to witness his travail of suffering and death. Even low church traditions recognize the power of this moment and ask the existential question “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”. And “yes”, we say, and indeed we tremble.

Easter announces that death does not have the final say over the spirit of Jesus. The Church boldly proclaims Resurrection, that Jesus is alive, and his message goes on. In my tradition, nowhere is this celebrated more powerfully than the Easter Vigil. The inbreaking of Light into the Darkness of the tomb provides an experiential way of making this story your own. If you have not experienced an Easter Vigil liturgy, I urge you this year to check around and find an Episcopal parish or Roman Catholic parish to attend. You will thank me, although your thanks should go to the Church which resurrected this ancient ritual during liturgical renewal.

Easter is followed by forty days of celebrating the Risen Lord, paying attention to the various resurrection appearances by Jesus to his disciples. It leads to his Ascension into heaven on that 40th day, but with the promise of the coming of the Holy Spirit. That day is marked on the 50th day from Easter, known as Pentecost, as the Holy Spirit infuses the Church with a power to carry the message of Jesus beyond the limits of the Hebrew faith.

After Pentecost, we move into what is curiously known as Ordinary Time. It’s when we focus on the teachings of Jesus, handed down to us in the Gospels. Our quest is to learn how to follow Jesus in the way in which we live our lives. This seems rather logical and practical, but again the Church has sometimes faltered in a tendency to focus on orthodoxy rather than orthopraxy, that is, making sure our beliefs and theology are correct rather than putting the emphasis on how we follow the Jesus Way of being in the world, how we practice this way of love.

Ideally, we have both, right thinking and right action, but again I think the Church has tended to opt for head rather than the heart. One of the gifts of St. Francis, and one of the things that drew me to him was his emphasis on the basic acts of love and compassion as the best way of following Jesus. I am trying to lean into my life in this late season with a prejudice toward action and orthopraxis.

This last season of the Church year is the teaching season, or as I have called it, the “green season”. I call it “green” because that is the color of the vestments we wear in church liturgies during Ordinary time. For me, a garden guy, “green” connotes growth. Nothing is more beautiful to me than seeing the brilliant green break into the grey of winter. It sends a message of new life, and growth, and that is the point of this season, growing disciples, followers of the Jesus way of being in the world. I actually had the monks of the Trappist monastery at Spencer, Massachusetts to design my stoles that I wear in the “green season” to display vines that suggest growth, a good reminder for me as I was leading a parish through this season.

At the end of the liturgical year, or cycle, we find ourselves back at Advent, looking again to the horizon. But that is getting ahead of ourselves. We are in Epiphany, abiding in the knowledge that Jesus is the manifestation of God’s intent in Creation. Jesus displays in an embodied way what God wants us to be. I am encouraging you to lean into the Epiphanic reality by celebrating the gift that has been given to us in the person of Jesus.

You see, we are connected with this Jesus who is the Christ. However you happen to envision this connection, it can work wonders for you. “Jesus is my brother” works for many people that I have known and talked with about their spiritual pilgrimage. “Jesus walks beside me” seems to work for others. What is your way of seeing this incarnational connection? How do you image your relationship to Jesus?

For me, recently it has been inspired by an image that comes from an unlikely source, quantum physics. Shades of Sheldon and The Big Bang Theory, but I have been intrigued by the work of Ilia Delio, a Franciscan scholar, who has schooled me in the mysterious science of physics that sees a deep connection between all things that exist. Simply stated, that connection has been described as entanglement. Everyone is connected. That’s a spiritual truth that has been proclaimed throughout the ages, but now science, even physics, is finding the evidence that this is true. It is no mere altruistic gem, nor a folksy call to “come together” in a Sixties retro festival. It’s true. Scientifically based. So Jesus, over two thousand years removed in space and time, is connected to me. Entangled with me, and from my perspective, more importantly, I am entangled with him.

I am writing this on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a huge day for me through the years, being at Ebenezer Baptist on Sweet Auburn in Atlanta. or in the inaugural march downtown in Tyler, Texas shrouded in threats to our safety. We remember our brother Martin, unaware of the entanglement of quantum physics, but tuned into connection, even as he sat in the dank setting of a Birmingham jail: ” We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny… Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”. This deep, spiritual sense of connection led Martin to be willing to follow the Jesus way of love, even unto death.

Like Martin, I am entangled with Jesus, particularly in this season of Epiphany, as my mind is rescued from my spiritual amnesia. Jesus embodies, manifests, what God intended in Creation. But I am also entangled with my sisters and brothers in this world, in their sufferings, in their dreams, in their pain, and in their hope. This has the ethical implications and demands that Martin saw and responded to in full. Even unto death.

As I play with this new image of entanglement, of profound connection, I pray that I might find the courage to respond in this moment, in this season of Epiphany, with an event, in action, with acts of compassion as I move through this Creation that we share. Epiphany blessings!

I was reluctant. Reticent. Scared, perhaps, because I intuited what it might cost me.

But from the beginning, I didn’t have much choice. Watching the replay of The Sopranos reminded me of the massive, inescapable power of families.

My mother and grandparents were members of a South of God congregation in south Atlanta. I was in the nursery as an infant with another infant who would become one of my closest friends in high school, Tommy Elder. Connection. He and I actually roomed together on our Safety Patrol trip to Washington, DC when we were in seventh grade. We reconnected later in life, as I returned to Atlanta from my sojourn in Texas. I was able to be with him through a scary time of disease with his child at Egleston, the Emory children’s hospital. And finally, I even walked with my friend through “the valley” in Tommy’s own death. So my indoctrination started early, from the cradle. The infamous Baptist “Cradle Roll”.

My granddad took me with him to the Friendship Class, the old men’s class, when I was a child. My mom and dad took me to church every Sunday as a kid, so I attended Sunday School in the morning, Training Union on Sunday night, Royal Ambassadors on Wednesday nights. Like Steve Harvey says, we “loved us some church”.

But when I reflect back on those times, most of what I had experienced of South of God church was social in nature. Friendly, even loving, but incredibly social, with meals, conversations, and gatherings… lots of gatherings. It felt like a club that one had joined by being in the neighborhood, which is not a bad thing, but maybe not what Jesus originally had in mind.

The Bible stories, I enjoyed. We read the stories of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets. With my name “David”, it was an open invitation to identify with this hero who kicked Goliath’s ass in the classic underdog breakdown. I loved those David stories… until we hit the unfortunate Uriah-Bathsheba episode.

God was this amorphous presence that seemed to surround me, a mystical sense of connection. I had a few experiences that were cast in nature, not in church, where I had a profound moment of that sense of connection, but they were fleeting.

On the other hand, this Jesus intrigued me. He was on the cover of the Sears and Roebuck Bible purchased in West End I was given, seated with the children around him. I loved the stories about him when I was a child, but as formal operations, logic, and scientific reasoning kicked in, I began to wonder if this was just another version, a holy edition of a fairy tale. There was a moment in high school when I internally began to doubt all this stuff, but kept it to myself. Timing-wise, it coincided with the firing of my pastor for opening the “doors of the church” to black folks. That event made the hypocrisy of the Church all too clear to ignore. I loved the community, I loved my friends, but church had become bogus to me… a bridge too far. I opted out, physically and emotionally.

So how in the world did I make it back? Strangely, it was media, or drama that hooked me, and it still does.

It began with Jesus Christ Superstar. Introduced at a youth group meeting, I was attracted to the music at first more than the message. Heralded as a “rock opera”, whatever that was, my curiosity was peaked. The rock vibe and beat drew me in before I was paying attention to the narrative, a serious look into the Passion event of Jesus’ crucifixion. I was intrigued by the ambiguous relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, embodied in her song, I Don’t Know How to Love Him, which was in stark contrast to the hard-driving rock tones of the rest of the music. Soon, I caught on to the underlying philosophical question that was being raised: did Jesus have to die? It was my initial wrestling match with determinism: is the course of our life predetermined or are we free to choose? In this interpretation of the Gospel, the writer clearly sees the course of Jesus as predestined and it’s the drama of his “choice” to accept that fate. One line from Jesus echoes through the years: Everything is fixed, and you can’t change it! And the bombastic conclusion has Judas, originally played by Ben Vereen, asking the pregnant question, “Did you have to die like that, was that a mistake or did you know your messy death would be a record breaker?”.

I saw this rock opera on stage several times, and then watched the film production when it came out. While the thrust of Superstar was on determinism, for me it was making my Sears and Roebuck Jesus more real to me, raising deep questions as to who this Jesus was, and now more importantly to a budding human being, who this Jesus IS to me? It was the starting gun of my quest to figure that out. I had been handed a Bible, a story, a myth by my ancestors and now it was my time to decide what to make of it.

My next brush with a media presentation of Jesus came with Godspell. The significance of this piece of work in my life is huge. It comes directly from the Gospel of Matthew with the storyline following the progression of Jesus, baptized by John, calling his disciples, forming a community, and the subsequent teaching of Jesus’ radical interpretation of his Hebrew faith. When I first encountered it on film, it had a hippy flair, a freedom, an anti-establishment vibe that was trending at the time in our culture. I remember my impression of the love between the members of Jesus’ community of disciples, the warmth, as well as the demands of the teachings. It made Jesus real to me in a fresh way, in an existential way that pressed me as to how I understood, grasped, and accepted this view of life that ran counter to the way of the world. What was I to make of this Jesus?

In Godspell, it is “love” that gets the spotlight, not so much the question of determinism. The main question seems to be: will you love when faced with the question. Jesus stares this down in a dramatic moment at the conclusion in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus CHOOSES to follow love, even to the Cross and his death. That existential choice grabbed me by my soul at a time in which I was making some life choices, with the shadow of war and the draft looming, giving me the courage to lean into my life.

My home church actually took on a production of Godspell for our youth. Len Willingham, an amazing musician and minister, directed a cast of young people who did a great job of presenting this Broadway musical in the basement of the church. It inspired me later to direct a similar production when I was serving as the youth minister at Decatur First Baptist Church. I enlisted my brother, Mitch, to play Jesus and then drew from the talented youth of the church to fill out the cast. We did the musical in the packed sanctuary of the church and rocked the house. It’s one of my proudest moments. But the most important thing was that, as the director, it drove the storyline, the teachings of Jesus, the drama of his Passion, deeply into my soul. It transformed me as I witnessed the formation of my small group of actors into a caring community of love. Later, I would find myself taking on the role of John the Baptizer in a touring production of Godspell that made the story even more experiential for me.

My next evolution/revolution in connection to Jesus was the Cotton Patch Gospel. I had been exposed early to the work of Clarence Jordan, a South of God New Testament Greek scholar who transposed the biblical texts of the Gospel into a Southern idiom. Clarence had founded Koinonia Farms in Americus, Georgia as an experiment in Christian community, with a multiracial make-up of the group. You can imagine just how happy that social experiment made the South Georgia folks. It still exists today though it has morphed into a number of initiatives including Habitat for Humanity.

Clarence’s version of the Gospel put Jesus in the South, growing up in Gainesville, Georgia, set in the racial tensions between blacks and whites, as opposed to Samaritans and Jews. Atlanta becomes the center stage of the Passion instead of Jerusalem. Jesus gets lynched instead of crucified in Jordan’s translation which made a not-so-subtle point in his Southern ethos. As a Southern boy trying to make sense of Jesus, I was attracted early on to this novel approach as it was trying to make the Gospel speak directly to our tumultuous time.

That took a sudden turn for me when Harry Chapin decided to put the message of Cotton Patch into a musical. Harry wrote the music and brushed the outline to the play when it was interrupted by a car crash that took his life. His brother, Tom Chapin, took up the cause and decided to open it in Atlanta at the Alliance Theater. Tom Key, a remakable Atlanta actor, took on the work of writing the script for the more or less one-man show, backed by a four-piece bluegrass band.

I was there from the beginning, attending several pre-production events as well as the opening. To say that I was enamored, fascinated, is to put it mildly. “Obsessed” is a word that comes to mind. Its spirited presentation of the radical message of Jesus’ life and teachings transformed my thinking and being, right at the time of my ordination to the priesthood at the Episcopal Cathedral there on Peachtree in the heart of Atlanta. Tom Key’s brilliance, the virtuosity of the bluegrass band, and the close-quartered look at race wove a perfect combination to do the magic that only theater can produce. Once again, Jesus came to life for me by way of a dramatic presentation, this time with a Southern accent.

Which brings me to now. The Chosen. Several young clergy that I coach raved about it, encouraging me to watch it. I demurred, given the very title. It smacked of the determinism I had previously rejected. Finally, a few weeks ago, CBS Sunday Morning had a segment on it, highlighting the originator, Dallas Jenkins. I was intrigued. I clicked on the initial season. It highlighted Nicodemus, and Mary Magdalene, two of my favorite characters in the Gospel narrative.

I was captured by the excellent production qualities, the script, the character development, and the storyline. I have to admit, I dove into the deep end and have binge-watched the show. The character of Jesus is amazingly winsome, with kind eyes and a surprising sense of humor. I can not imagine a better draw in our current culture for Jesus. If you are intrigued by the person of Jesus, It provides a winsome introduction to Jesus’ teaching. But be careful…you may not really want to meet this Jesus, who might give insights and make demands that will transform your life.

For me, it was through media that I became enamored with the person and message of Jesus. It was supplemented by stellar scholarship on how his life was remembered and recorded. And it was bathed in the warm waters of ritual and tradition, scorched in the fiery conflict of activism. But it was the story, the drama that captured my soul initially and still carries it today.

We all come at questions of meaning and purpose in different ways. Whatever your circumstances, I hope you find a way, your unique way, to examine the life and Way of Love embodied in the person of Jesus. Blessings.

I began my first sermon at Christ Church in Tyler, Texas with his name, based on the assumption it would get me the congregation’s attention.

It did.

I did not know him at the time. He was infamous but our paths had not crossed. Henry Bell and various others had slipped his name into conversations between martinis at Willowbrook Country Club as I was learning about the ethos of East Texas. His name was always mentioned as if they were letting you in on an uncle that had been relegated to the basement for his own good, as well as that of the family.

It would be a few years into burn for me to meet William Wayne. It was following a night, August 7th, the night of our wedding anniversary, when our house was broken into. My work on race relations in Tyler had gotten some notice from the local Klan group and they were trying to get my attention.

They did.

I got a phone call the next day from Judge Justice to go to lunch. He informed me that he knew what it was like to take an unpopular stand in this community. He was rather matter of fact as I remember it, pledging his support as well as monitoring of my house by the U.S. Marshalls. I was in a new country. Our conversation was cordial but business-like. Near the end, he asked me about how I got into ministry. I shared my story, including my South of God background, which we had in common, as well as my exodus from it at the firing of my pastor over his civil rights efforts. My work for a former Democratic Congressman while in college caught his attention as did my choice for ministry rather than law or politics. We ended our first meeting with one of those promises you make but never intend to fulfill. “Let’s meet for lunch next month.”.

We did.

We continued to do that, meet for lunch, once a month, for a year. At one of our lunches, Wayne asked if it would be okay for him to come to my church for a service. He did not want it to hurt my reputation. I assured him that it would not.

It did.

Many people asked me about it when he started showing up on Sundays. What’s he up to? Did I know his history? These were my Bush Republican friends who had no taste for Wayne”s Democratic pedigree. Wayne started showing up for my Bible studies and to my Sunday School classes. He asked me what it would take for him to join my church. He did not want any special treatment. I explained about the confirmation process for adults, which took about nine months of classes. He then informed me that he did want to be “special” so I set up a series of times for my private instruction to prepare him for confirmation by a bishop in the Episcopal Church.

He was.

Confirmed, that is. It was a highlight of my career as I watched a bright man, soured by the prejudice of religion, awaken to the life-giving Spirit of a faith that celebrated his questioning, his curiosity, his passion. Honest to God, Wayne never missed church, or my class unless he was away teaching at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in Boston. He became the biggest evangelist for Christ Church, encouraging his young clerks to attend, inviting his friends to join him at worship. What a surprise.

It was.

Wayne and I would often meet on Saturday’s out on Highway 31 in Kilgore, the notorious “county line” from the “dry” Smith County of Tyler. The place was a shack, a barbecue joint called Pat. G’s. There, we would solve the problems of the world over the best barbecue and long-neck beers on the planet. Politics, beer, religion, in smokey ambiance…it was heaven to me. Just down the way was the Country Tavern, known for its ribs, favored by Governor W. Bush, soon to be President who would fly those ribs into DC to the White House. It was Mecca for this boy whose grandfather raised him right. Mind you, they favored beef, whereas in West Georgia, we were more porcine-inclined. But when in Rome, or Kilgore, you do as the natives do.

One of my favorite memories of Wayne was from one of my last Sunday School classes I was teaching before I was leaving to return to Atlanta. I had designed a series of classes on tough issues facing the church. I was following the same format Dean John Sanders had set up for me my last month at the Cathedral which he entitled Hot Potatoes. He had me teach about race, ecology, and homosexuality. Who better to tell the Truth than someone who was leaving town…quickly!

I still remember my last class, on homosexuality, one woman on the front row in Bishop’s Hall who was screwing herself into the uncomfortable seat she was sitting in on the front row. As I concluded my remarks, I opened for Q&A. Her hand shot up first. When I called on her, she replied, “Canon Galloway, I appreciate all your learned teaching, but I just wish they would not try to cram it down out throat!”.

There was a pregnant silence that I broke when I responded, “I’m not sure I would have put it quite that way.” . It birthed an explosion of hearty Episcopal laughter. I paid her later.

I employed the same strategy as I was preparing to leave Christ Church, Tyler, doing a series of lessons at the Church School hour on Sunday in between services. The first one was based on Jesus’ Parable of the Viineyard, from Matthew 20: 1-6. After an introduction, I began to read it, with Jesus teaching: The Kingdom of Heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and then sent them into the vineyard. So far so good.

As the story goes, the owner repeats this hiring process at nine o’clock, again at noon, at three, and finally at five. As the story goes, when evening comes, the owner says to his foreman, pay the workers, beginning with the last ones hired, and ending up with the first.

The last ones hired received a denarius, as did those hired at three, noon, nine, and early morning.

That was simply too much for Judge Justice, sitting in the center of the third row, his regular place. He erupted: “That’s not fair!”.

“Precisely.”, I responded. Now I know that Wayne must have heard this parable before in his time as a South of God Baptist but maybe this time he was leaning into the Scripture, and Jesus, in a new way.

“Would you like to hear how it ends?”.

And I continued with the reading from Matthew as it states clearly that the earlier workers shared the Judge’s objection as to the fairness of the transaction, or rather, the unfairness. The word used is “grumbled” describing their objection.

The owner of the vineyard reminds them that he is the owner of the vineyard. Did they not agree to the wage at the beginning of the day? The question was rhetorical…of course they had. And here comes the point. Every parable has a point: Don’t I, the owner of the vineyard, have the right to be generous with my wealth? The last will be first and the first shall be last.

Reversal of what is expected.. Unexpected. Not a meritocracy. Everyone gets the same pay in spite of unequal time put in and energy exerted. How can that be? How does that make any sense?

Jesus here is driving home the notion of grace, which has been popularly referred to as “unmerited favor”, that God loves you in spite of your self. It’s freely given. All you have to do is accept it, which seems to be a hard thing for most of us socialized in a transactional system. But that is what Jesus is pushing, and it all rides on the presupposition that the owner of the vineyard makes the rules, not us workers, us laborers.

The particular parable is only included in the Gospel of Matthew. Each Gospel has a particular and peculiar voice, and a specific audience to whom it is addressed. Matthew comes out of a more specifically defined Hebrew tradition. Even its literary structure is set up into five distinct sections, corresponding to the five books of the Torah. Some scholars suggest that this parable is strategically aimed at the Jewish audience, giving license for us Gentiles who came late to the gig to be accepted as “kosher”, that is, we get in the party of God’s Kingdom in spite of being tardy.

That makes some logical sense to me, given the placement of the parable in this particular Gospel. But for me, it serves as a more generalized re-minder to our tendency for spiritual amnesia… we forget who the owner of the vineyard is. We get confused and start thinking with our egos, imagining that we are in charge, we make the rules. In fact, in reality, we are inextricably part of the vineyard, connected to it…just not the owner. Jesus, through this parable/story is making the point that the owner, the Creator, has discretion as to how to determine worth. We laborers should not succumb to jealousy and pettiness when it comes to the generosity of our gracious owner of the vineyard we work in.

Wayne and I had a long talk about this over a long-necked beer and barbecue at Pat G.’s the next Saturday. He was still struggling with wrapping his judicial mind around such Grace, after all he, like me, was raised on a South of God legalistic system of seeing God as a Judge in the Sky, who will get you when you die, so you had better watch out, the Cosmic version of Santa Claus.

But the Good News is that Jesus’ parable/story was still doing its work by cracking open the hard nut of our encapsulated minds by suggesting another way, a way of Grace, a way of abundance, which can liberate you to unimaginable joy and generosity. There at that Texas juke joint pine table, I would dare say that Wayne and I celebrated holy communion and had our hearts, minds, and souls strangely warmed…or maybe it was just the barbecue. But my sense is that in engaging in our Creative Interchange in that liminal space, known as the County Line in Texas, we were transformed, our minds were changed. Jesus called it “metanoia”, recovering the childlike eyes to see the world afresh. You might even risk saying that we were born again.

I hope you are enjoying the season of Christmas, the Twelve Days set aside to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Some folks put away their decorations on the 26th of December, but traditionally the Church continues to focus on the Mystery of Incarnation, God enfleshed, Spirit and Matter intermingled in the person of Christ until January 6. Christmas season ends on that date with Epiphany, literally “the manifestation” of the Christ to the world represented by the appearance of the Magi, popularly noted as the Wise Men bearing gifts, a symbol of the recognition that something of cosmic significance has occurred in this unlikely venue of a humble stable.

For me, the Twelve Days of Christmas was an opportunity to “take a breath”, to pause, with a time of remembrance of Christmas past, to assess the present, the Eternal Now moment, and to begin to plan for the New Year. But, I confess that immediately after Christmas, my attention was on Christmas memories. This year, my reverie was prompted by a phone call from out of the blue…from Tyler, Texas, area code 903.

It was a wonderful interruption in my day’s work. The sexton, the person charged with taking care of the building, at Christ Church, Tyler called me a few days before Christmas to let me know that he was retiring. I was the fortunate Rector who had found and hired Ledell Reed thirty years ago and he was one of the best hires I ever made. Ledell saw his job as a great opportunity to work for God, and he delivered faithfully on that commitment every year I was there. For me, he had a kind of biblical countenance, an air of dedication that I find rare, that might lead me to cast him as a disciple in The Chosen. What a Christmas gift it was to speak with my old friend who was sharing his good news with me. It became my latest memory of Christmas joy.

It should not be a surprise that I have a host of Christmas memories, having served as a South of God minister and Episcopal priest for over forty years. “Forty” serves as a mystical number in the Hebrew faith…the number of years the Hebrews wandered in the desert. Forty. For Christians, it’s the number of days Jesus spent being tempted in the wilderness. Forty. It’s an idiom meaning: a long damn time. And so it is.

I have so many memories that pop into my brain, heart, and soul at Christmas…many that I have shared with you in South of God. Most are humorous, some sublime.

One of my favorites was me, playing “director”, trying to get the live camera shot on the Bishop at the live WSB televised Midnight Mass at the Cathedral in Atlanta. As the service was beginning, I told the man on Camera 1, “Put the camera on the Bishop!”. The cameraman, who was not an Episcopalian asked “Which one is the Bishop?”. On the monitor screen in the Ted Turner TBS control truck, I pointed to the Bishop to the real director, who quickly barked, “The fat guy with the pointed hat!”. Bishop Child roared laughing when I told him the story after the service…just one of the many reasons I loved him.

Then there was the year when I kidnapped the blond-haired, blue-eyed Baby Jesus from the creche, so that it would force a replacement of non-ethnic olive wood.

And then some not-so-pleasant memories of me, trying to contain an over-served bishop from ruining Christmas Eve.

Probably, the image of a community gathered takes the prize. The clergy gathering behind the Cathedral after a six hour marathon of live TV to celebrate the birth of Jesus and our survival with drinks served out of the trunk of a well-stocked red Dodge convertible.

Concluding a Christmas Eve service in Tyler, with lights off, candles lit, stained glass illumined from the outside, as we sang Silent Night a capella. When I arrived, I recoiled at its smaltzy nature, but when I left, it was what I remembered most.

I began my gathering of memories of Christmas in Texas at my first time of preaching to a Texan crowd. I had arrived in September, in time for the Tyler Rose Festival, ahead of my family, my wife fresh from the delivery of our second child, Mary Glen, on July 29th. Happily, that same infant, Mary Glen is now pregnant with our first grandchild this Christmas, a special blessing.

The family did not join me in Tyler until November, as I lived at the Residence Inn as our Azalea District house was closing. I used that time to do deep research into the culture into which I was diving, trying to find out where the bodies were buried, the sacred cows roamed, and the myths held sway. I was bringing with me the change management theory taught to me by Daryl Conner and Charlie Palmgren that I had applied to my work as Canon Pastor at the Cathedral in Atlanta. Could this theory “work” in transforming a traditional parish into a more intentional spiritual community? I would soon find out.

Back to Christmas. It was my first Christmas in Tyler. For many less-than-regular attendees of Christ Church, Christmas Eve would be their first chance to experience and assess the new Rector, this hot-shot kid from Atlanta. Also, Christmas Eve is what I call Prime Time, even before Deion Sanders, as it is a great opportunity to reach out to those who see Christmas Eve as a grand social event, a time when people show up even if they are not formally members. So I was feeling the pressure, particularly my first time out of the gate.

When I stepped into the pulpit to preach on that first Christmas Eve, I took a deep breath and paused, surveying the crowd, looking to my left, then to my right. And then, I uttered my first godly words:

William Wayne Justice.

A gasp could be heard through the crowd. I waited, paused, as the shock of my three words moved through the audience.

After enough time, I relieved their anxiety with the following: My sermon has nothing to do with Judge William Wayne Justice but in talking with folks since I arrived, I was told that if I wanted to get peoples’ attention, all I had to do was mention the name “William Wayne Justice”.

Laughter, born out of relief, filled the sacred space. It did what was promised: I got their attention.

You see, as I surveyed the Tyler culture, I found out many things. My good friend, Henry Bell, took the time to show me, on newsprint in the bank’s board room. who was connected to who. Invaluable. Henry always had my back and I was honored to give him his last rites and be by his side as he breathed his last. That is the intimate gift of being a priest. In birth, in transition, in joining, in tragedy, in falls, in recovery, in death. Perhaps in Tyler, I felt the gift of being a priest more than at any time in my life.

But Henry clued me into a couple of more facts that day. The only famous people in Tyler are Earl Campbell and William Wayne Justice. Earl grew up in Tyler, played football for the University of Texas, won the prestigious Heisman trophy, and went on to stardom as a punishing running back for the Houston Oilers. I knew of Earl, even though he lived in Austin. He and I became good friends and golf partners through the years. I wound up functioning as his Tyler “broker” as folks were constantly asking him for donations for various projects. Earl would ask them to check in with “The Rev” so that I could determine if their ask was legit. Earl and I also shared a deep love for BB King. Righteous. I actually was the first person to invite Earl to play golf as my guest at the traditional country club in Tyler that was mighty white. On the day of our match, Earl was mobbed by fans like the folk hero that he is in Texas.

The other guy, William Wayne Justice, was a federal judge in Tyler, Texas. One of his rulings finally enacted the desegregation of education, in 1972, for which he was hated. His South of God preacher responded by denouncing him from the pulpit, at which point, Wayne walked out of the church, vowing to never go back to church again. He was infamous. I never asked people about Wayne, his name would just pop up in conversation, even more than the Tyler Rose, Earl Campbell. So I decided to use that power to get the attention of my congregation on my first Christmas.

It was risky business, but hell, my coming to Tyler, Texas was a gamble. Might as well start off with a shot across the bow.

That first Christmas in Tyler… it’s one of my favorite memories, namely because of the courage I had to summon in taking on a leadership role that would consume my life for a decade. Did I have that courage in me? This moment was a symbol. It was a precursor, a proleptic foretelling of my role in calling out a family secret, even in a sentimental time such as Christmas Eve. The family secret was “race” and I was going to confront it. And the particular sin of Tyler was “comfort” and I was going to try to disrupt it. Not exactly “tidings of comfort and joy”.

Those of you who have been reading my story over the last few weeks will know what a game change that was for me. What’s even more funny is the role William Wayne Justice played in my time in Tyler and his connection to the congregation in which I invoked his name on that first night of Christmas Eve. That will be next week’s article.

Christmas blessings in these Twelve Days of Christmas feast.