Patrick

Patrick, a runaway slave, left civilization behind and returned to the land of his captors as a missionary bishop. There his crude Latin - an embarrassment in the civilized world - fit those to whom he wrote, notably Coroticus, a British slaver who called himself a Christian. No Christian are you, said Patrick, for you kidnap and enslave the innocent. 

Patrick didn’t write much besides his letter to Coroticus but he did write an ‘apologia’ of sorts - an account of his own fitness for ministry and his credibility as a witness to the saints. It was rough and ready, more like something from the letters of Paul of Tarsus than the literary Confessions of Augustine of Hippo.

His feast we celebrate just a few days before the equinox in March. Cultural appropriation is hardly a sufficient label: in an earlier century it was an occasion for Irish immigrants that had newly become American to proclaim their love for and loyalty to their new country. But now it is often an occasion for the wearin’ o’ the green simply to avoid being pinched, or buying the house a round.

And so we are more likely to associate the equinox with another feast of the Christian year, the Annunciation. If we celebrate the Nativity of our Savior on December 25th it is only sensible that we count nine months back to celebrate his expectation. “Here am I” says Mary, the angels let out a long held breath, and the redemption of creation begins anew. 

We nowadays seek to celebrate more than our own survival, our rescue from the pit of sin or despond: we want to mark a day in spring as a reminder of God’s creation of all things, and our place among them. 

Yet why not, this year as any other, remind ourselves that among God’s creatures are the least of people, the forgotten, the invaded, the captive: those assaulted in their own homes and drawn away to a foreign land, as the people of Patrick were, and all those who have ached for the release from captivity, the healing of wounds, and the balm of the Spirit Mary’s son bears.

equinox

Look up and find the north star and know where you are. Watch the moon rise or set and know when you cannot see it, still it is there, a silent companion, unjudging, always present. When the sun rises and you face its rays you are literally reoriented. Understandable, then, that people always have drawn upon the changes and constancies in the skies for a sense of where and who they are. More involved is the understanding behind equinox. Every year predictably feature writers remind us that the days grow shorter as nights grow longer, and vice versa. They tell us that traditional feast days of many cultures coincide with the changes of the seasons, and with the long and short of days and nights. In between the longest and shortest are the equinoxes, the times when day and night are roughly equal, equidistant between the polar opposites of midwinter night and midsummer day. These are also occasions for observance of the heavens’ changes, and of our own. We see around us the seasons progress (or it seems, recede) around the solar revolution of the planet. We see the changes in plant and animal, weather and cloud. And we see in ourselves our reactions, some subtle, some not. “Are you ready for some football?” is not the least profound of our responses to changes in the year. Shopping for clothes and shoes, a box of pencils or an eraser or a backpack, or at last a new tablet, mark the beginning of a new school year. We find new paths to old places as rains carve new channels in the washes, and enjoy old paths that take us someplace new as seasons run. It all seems very benign, innocuous, … unless the day comes when a storm or sunstroke overwhelms us. Our desert is not benign, it is neutral. It is indifferent. What we do in it, for ourselves or others, is up to us. It will be hot or cold, brutally severe or calmingly luxurious, depending on our situation. If we find again that people are in need or want or distress because of the extremities of our weather, the fault, dear friends, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Think about it – If you were to travel down the streams of the Sonoran Desert northwards into what has become Arizona territory, you would encounter along the riparian corridors varied landforms of mountain and plain. Farther north you would ascend an escarpment or even a staircase of river beds to reach the higher mountains of the middle to north of the state. Beyond that, you would reach higher desert, mesa country, and a great canyon bearing waters from many streams toward the gulf of California. Toward - but mostly not into - that sea, because of agricultural, industrial, and residential diversions.

Irrigation is nothing new to Arizona. Some canals are centuries old; slices of them are seen in museum displays. Cultivation supplemented hunting and gathering as long as four millennia ago at places like the base of the dark mountain where Tucson sprang to life. 

But now water set aside from the flow of the rivers is draining through porous sandstone in the reservoirs, evaporating from the surface of canals, pouring blithely on the ground from busted pipes and open faucets. We cannot long sustain this prodigal squandering of what would be abundance, if it were justly shared. 

Our challenge now is to find that water-justice: sharing our rights with other beings and with the land itself. Will we greed-head ourselves into extinction and take the blossoms with us? Or live together, past this equinox and into a new era, serene and equitable, with beauty and justice for all?

JRL+ 2/25/2022

https://azdiocese.org/2022/03/stars-and-streams/

Paria River in lower Paria Canyon (Photo: Pamela Hyde)

Two Freedoms

“Free to worship him without fear” - these words form on the lips of Episcopalians every time they say or sing the Song of Zechariah during Morning Prayer. For some of them that is every day.

Among the people who were immersed in this practice from childhood we may number a President. And these words had consequences beyond the privacy of morning devotions.

One day Franklin Roosevelt sat down at his desk and wrote out a speech he meant to give before Congress. (The State of the Union, January 6, 1941.) In it he named four freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. 

(He went on to write: "That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb. To that new order we oppose the greater conception–the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.")

The four freedoms became the basis, the Reverend James Richardson tells me, of the Atlantic Charter, the basic agreement between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, on their common goals in the Second World War.

Prayer. Consequences. Free to worship him without fear - that is two of four. And so the simple daily practice of morning devotions can change the world. And change you.

The Four Freedoms (https://www.fdrlibrary.org/four-freedoms)

The Atlantic Charter (https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/atlantic-conf)

The Song of Zechariah (Luke 1:68-79)