Dear Members, Friends, Siblings, All,

If you read the UCC Daily Devotional (and you will be glad you did, even if you check in only now and then), you will have seen Lillian Daniel’s offering, “Sometimes, It Takes a Book.” Oh, what a balm that was for my sagging soul. I thank God and do a little happy dance when some courageous soul finds just the words for what I have been struggling with and shares them. Link: https://www.ucc.org/daily-devotional/sometimes-it-takes-a-book-2/

In an age of algorithmic indignation and digital squawking, I’m tired of darting from one screenshot to another in a state of online outrage…I thirst for the Peace of Christ that passes all human ranting and writing.…As a result, I stop reading the news…There, I have confessed it. (italics are mine)

You already know that I am afraid of the news and that, when something sneaks in, I run and hide under the bed for a renewed, even longer period of abstinence. All the while crying, “Lord, have mercy on us!” And looking up the Canadian Consulate’s phone number to ask how many US citizens they will allow to emigrate this year. I am not proud of it, and it seems I am not alone. Not alone now and never have been.

Someone said the Jeremiah is known as the “weeping prophet” because he felt so deeply for the Exile community. Foreign armies had destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and then forced the Israelites to live elsewhere. Remember “by the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered [Mount] Zion.” Some of us think we are in exile right now.

My dear friend, Reid, sent an email today that spoke directly to me. (Another gift in words that help me make sense of me, and a happy dance.) Her rector at the Cathedral of Saint Philip, The Rev. George Maxwell, writes fictional letters and this one was especially uplifting to me, as in “nailed it!”

Dear Anna,

In your last note you asked what I mean when I speak of “Anglican consciousness.” Urban T. Holmes, in his little book What Is Anglicanism? says it is not a system of doctrines so much as a way of inhabiting tensions. Anglicans are marked, he says, by a dialectical imagination, able to hold opposites together until grace shows its face.

Think of how we read Scripture: we prize study and scholarship, yet we also chant psalms and linger over poetry. Or how we approach the sacraments: we trust that bread and wine truly bear Christ’s presence, but we do not insist on explaining how. We live with paradox, and that is our strength. Holmes even calls it a “poetic” sensibility—truth discovered by resonance more than by argument.

This instinct goes back to the early monks who entered the desert in the third and fourth centuries to live more truthfully. They discovered that solitude needed community, silence needed speech, prayer needed service. They taught that tensions are not problems to be solved but invitations to wisdom.

So when I speak of Anglican consciousness, I mean a way of life that holds mystery and reason, solitude and companionship, earthiness and transcendence, in creative tension. It is less about solving and more about staying—remaining with the questions, the prayers, the people—until God’s grace becomes apparent to us.

Your affectionate uncle,

Ames

© The Cathedral of St. Philip. All rights reserved.

Ah, there it is. The Peace of Christ and the struggles of a living with our neighbors together, not mutually exclusive options, in creative—that is, life-giving, future-making—tension. (Oh boy, is this tension creative.) Our own Luther Smith’s testimony is that “hope is here because God is here” and in our practices that maintain That Presence, alive—solitude and community, silence and speech, prayer and service, and more.

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 is our text for Sunday, and I am looking for a good word for this journey, one I can proclaim without reservation and unspeakable joy. But it is Yahweh who is crying, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” What?!?

So, what if “the voice of Jeremiah’s judgment brings with it a powerful voice of hope? The suffering of exile is for the Old Testament the martrix in which the hope of God is most powerfully and characteristically at work. The Exile is the place where God’s faithful promises work a profound newness.” (WB) We’re in that matrix.

It’s a mess out here, true. But Israel’s fundamental conviction—OUR fundamental conviction–is that Yahweh (compassionate) is sovereign over the present situation and can work good out of it. (WB) That must be what our enslaved ancestors knew for sure. I’m just holding to God’s unchanging hand.

Annual meeting will follow the 11:00 am worship and I will try to be brief. Streamers and Gatherers, I hope to see you there or to be seen in your company. It’s all better together.

Love and hugs,

RL