The Empress and the Sinner

My wife told me a story once about the funeral of a great Empress. A grand procession accompanied her remains to the cathedral and when they arrived at the doors, a voice from within asked, “Who seeks entry?” And a herald pounded on the great doors and proclaimed, “Open! For the Great Empress, Protector of the Faith, etc., etc., etc.” - and the doors remained closed. “I do not know her.” Again. The doors stayed shut. Then finally the herald humbly asked, “Please open the doors for Catherine, a sinner, a child of your own redeeming.” The doors opened wide. And the welcome was glorious.

This story comes to mind this week for a couple of reasons. Two festivals are coming up in the Church calendar, one right after the other: All Saints and All Souls. On November 1st while we are recovering from a candy binge we remember the Saints of the Church recognized in our calendar. On the following day we remember All Faithful Departed,  All Souls, that is, a commemoration of every one, known and unknown, who has gone before us into glory.

And the other reason is that the story of the empress resonates with a parable of Jesus… which I will tell here with the labels removed from the characters. 

“Two people went up to the temple to pray. One …stood and prayed about himself with these words, ‘God, I thank you that I’m not like everyone else—crooks, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this person here. I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of everything I receive.’ But the other stood at a distance. He wouldn’t even lift his eyes to look toward heaven. Rather, he struck his chest and said, ‘God, show mercy to me, a sinner.’ I tell you, this person went down to his home justified rather than the other. All who lift themselves up will be brought low, and those who make themselves low will be lifted up.” (Luke 18:10-14, Common English Bible, paraphrased)

“God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” is the prayer at the heart of this gospel story. In fact, in folk tradition, this prayer becomes ‘the Jesus prayer’ - the prayer one may recite repeatedly until it sinks into one’s heart. It can become a reflex, a prayer as close as breath, one that accompanies every step.

Of course in Boy Scouts the closest to a prayer that accompanied every step was, “A hundred bottles of beer on the wall.” Not so eternally sustaining. 

Many people have versions of the Jesus Prayer, simpler or more elaborate than the prayer of the man in the Temple, building on it or stripping it down to a simple “Je-sus” inhale/exhale, or adding words, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

And of course there is a long tradition of other repeated recited prayers. 

This one can be ours, as people of faith. Or as sinners. To be more accurate. And to be a bit humble about it. Nobody really owns this prayer; but one may own up to it.

The great empress, when all her finery had been folded and put away, was still a soul in search of God. Of mercy. 

And the Psalms remind us that, 

Our sins are stronger than we are, but you will blot them out.

and that we are welcome, not because of our own merit or position or greatness in the world, or conversely our practiced pieties, but because God is great and God is gracious. 

In other religious traditions we come across a saying that could be taken from the Psalms, “Let these words be written above my throne: ‘My mercy always prevails over my wrath.’” 

In other words, however tremblingly terrifyingly true it might be that God’s holiness and majesty, and our faltering failings, may be in chasmic distance from each other, God will come to us, as Jesus came, to bridge that gap between unutterable majesty and ineffable holiness, and our own - rightly acknowledged - humble condition.

The good news is that God does not leave us in despair, or the loneliness of sin, but comes to us, and brings us home.

Happy are they whom you choose and draw to your courts to dwell there! they will be satisfied by the beauty of your house, by the holiness of your temple. Awesome things will you show us in your righteousness, O God of our salvation, O Hope of all the ends of the earth and of the seas that are far away. (Psalm 65:3,4-6)

Father John Leech is a priest associate of the Episcopal Church of Saint Matthew in Tucson.

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http://edgeofenclosure.org/proper25c.html

Two unusual sources of inspiration from Prof. Laura Hollengreen's University Humanities Seminar on World War One and the Avant-Garde:

Jay Winter, “Homecomings:  The Return of the Dead,” in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press,1995), 15-28.

Allyson Booth, “Corpselessness” in Postcards from the Trenches:  Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War (New York and Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1996) 21-49. 

The Arizona Daily Star published a version of this essay under the title “Humble yourself to be lifted up” in its Keeping the Faith feature, Home + Life section, Sunday November 6th 2022, E3. https://arizonadailystar-az.newsmemory.com/?selDate=20221106&goTo=E03&artid=4

all souls

Tonight I could have watched some of my favorite comic book characters combine forces to achieve a victory over Death. It was the kind of arena-rock scale movie that requires big gestures, broad humor, and lots of noise. 

Instead I went to a requiem mass for all faithful departed, at my local Episcopal church. There were production values there too. Cordial neighbors, marvelous music, beautiful art, lovely building; in the midst of it was a man raising a piece of bread and saying, "This is my body."

And so in the midst of a remembrance of death, of a death in particular, came the gift of life.

As long as we have the story, the bread and wine, the water and oil, each other and the Spirit, we will be all right. 

(Herb O'Driscoll said that; he was right.)

In the midst of a celebration of death, a remembrance of the dead, and a solemn liturgy, a simple gesture reminded us: that in that very moment of perishing, of emptying out, of offering his very substance of life, the Christ Jesus did achieve a victory over death - a victory that was final. And has yet to be completed. As we have yet to be complete. For we are part of that victory. 

Not by bombast or melody, not by might or mousy self-erasure, but by a simple act of substance: a giving of ourselves commensurate with that victory: total.



And in the midst of it, amidst well-meaning neighbors and uncomfortable feelings breaking me out of the spell of the liturgy, I remembered my mother, who died this past August, reciting for me in June something surprising, a poem she must have learned as a little girl. It was a private smile to share amid the tragic solemnities:

Bean soup
tastes so bad
it makes me mad
when Mother gives
such stuff to me;

But when I pour it 
on the floor
I am as happy 
as can be.

When Mother spanks
I give her thanks 
for I know
'tis good for me.

Thanks, Mom.

 

All Souls' Day Mass and Reception 

The Commemoration of All Faithful Departed, also known as All Soul's Day, is this upcoming Thursday, November 2nd. At 7:00pm we will hold a Requiem Mass in memory of all those who have died. You can submit names of loved ones you would like to have remembered at this service by emailing Kelli at k.d.joyce@stphilipstucson.org by Wednesday, November 1st. The Saint Philip's Staff Singers and the Canterbury Choir will perform Requiem for My Friend by Zbignew Preisner and In Paradisum by Eriks Esenvald, in what will be the Southern Arizona premiere for both works. Following the Eucharist there will be a reception hosted by the Parish Life Committee in the Perry Garden. Please don't miss this wonderful and moving service!  -- from the parish news, Saint Philip's in the Hills, October 26, 2017.

Remembering 5A

For some reason today as I think ahead to All Saints and All Faithful Departed (All Souls) observances later this week, what came to mind was my joy at seeing Eugene and his partner Frank years after I met them in the summer of 1977. Back then I was the 'file boy' as my neighbor Lamar Spencer so kindly put it, a GS-2 clerk-typist at the US Environmental Protection Agency Region Nine headquarters, in downtown San Francisco, at 100 California Street. Years later, after the AIDS epidemic had peaked, I saw them at a party - and was overjoyed. For years I had wondered if they survived, and there they were, and together.

In the meantime I had worked with the Rev. Canon William (Bill) Barcus, who served as the AIDS spokesman for the Bishop of California as long as he could. The last time I saw Bill he waved valiantly to me, hands full of groceries, from the sidewalk in the Castro, along upper Market Street, as I drove by.

And later I tried volunteering at San Francisco General Hospital, Ward 5A, which by then had taken over as the principal treatment center for AIDS patients.

This was well before the disease was fully understood and before more effective and affordable treatments became available.

What I remembered this morning was not the where or what - but the sudden sense of the loss of a whole generation of young men. Loss, and grief, and sorrow.

And some gratitude at their valiant hope - for others if not themselves - and patience.

And the love of others for those who suffered and whom we have lost.

Robert, Andy...


http://pdf.oac.cdlib.org/pdf/csf/sfpl/aidsward.pdf