The Birdbath Saint

 Sandhill Cranes, Whitewater Draw, February 28th 2021. Photo: the author.

A young man in fancy clothes got off his horse, took his rich apparel and the fine fabrics he was carrying, and sold them in a neighboring town. He gave the cash -or tried to- to the priest at a small derelict church, which, as he could see, was falling down. The priest, worldly enough to anticipate trouble, refused the offered money. Whereupon the young man in disgust and frustration cast the coins into a corner of the church. Soon enough his father came looking for him, imprisoned him in a basement, and accused him of theft. Then in front of the entire town, bishop and everybody, the father demanded the son return all he had had from him.  

And so the young man did just that. He divested himself of his attire and stood naked before his accuser, that was his father, and the bishop. The bishop quickly put his cope around the young man’s shoulders and led him away. Later in the bishop’s garden the young man found a cloak abandoned by an under-gardener and, chalking a cross on the back, happily adopted it as his new garb. 

And then he began his new life. He embarked on a new kind of pilgrimage, even a new kind of crusade, as he traveled about his home country and farther afield, even to Palestine and an encounter with “the enemy” across the front lines of a Crusaders’ battle. He preached to the people and begged for his daily bread. He struggled with his inner temptations, and he gave freely of what he had. It drove some people crazy. And it attracted others.

About 795 years ago, much of a lifetime later, a poor little man died in central Italy, surrounded by friends he called his “little brothers”. Worn out with work, travel, illness, and excessive self-deprivation, he died exhausted, as he had driven his frail frame beyond its ordinary powers. 

Indeed, at the end of his life he admitted, “I’ve been too hard on Brother Ass.”-- He called his body Brother Ass, like an overburdened burro. 

He called all created things his brother or sister, not just humans, though surely those, but the sun, the moon, the elements, animals … and at last even death.

He himself was known to his friends as Brother Francis, though as soon as he died he was acclaimed as a saint. 

Saint Francis is known for several things: his passion for the gospel, his embrace of poverty, his leadership of the religious orders known as Franciscans, his love for creation, and of course birdbaths.

He is said to have preached to a wolf, and to birds. Indeed, he is often known for the latter. We might call him “the birdbath saint.” Once as I crossed the street to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, a crowd of pigeons lifted off the roof of Diocesan House and gathered at my feet. What would Francis do? He would preach! I didn’t have the temerity to admonish them to repent; instead quietly I urged them to rejoice in our fellow creaturehood.

We celebrate Creation Sunday on a Sunday close to October 4th, the feast of Saint Francis.

And it is only right. As we look at creation around us, all creatures, each other, ourselves, we look at them in part through Francis’ eyes. 

He regarded all things through the lens of his devotion to his Lord and because of that he embraced what is holy in all things.

This was not an easy road. 

Early in his career he asked God to grant him to know the pain and the love Jesus felt on the cross. And perhaps he did. 

What we remember today - without forgetting the pain of the passion - is the love that surrounds it.

The love of the passion: paradoxical, all-embracing. 

Today that love we particularly remember as we look with gratitude, hope, guilt, and a deepening desire to care, upon our fellow creatures, especially this fragile earth that is our home, and our creaturely neighbors, from fish and birds to sky and sea. 

How can we love our fellow creatures as God would have us love them - as family? Maybe seeing through the eyes of the little poor man of Assisi - Saint Francis - will help.

Most High, all-powerful, good Lord, yours is the praise, the glory and the honor and every blessing.

To you alone, Most High, do they belong, and no one is worthy to speak your name.

Praised be you, my Lord with all your creatures,...

O praise and bless my Lord, thank him and serve him humbly but grandly!

(from the Canticle of the Sun by Francis of Assisi)

 

Some material previously published as "Love all of God's creation", Arizona Daily Star, Home + Life, Keeping the Faith. October 10th 2021. E3. Used with permission.

https://azdiocese.org/2022/09/the-birdbath-saint/ (September 14th 2022).

creation care : an unfinished parable

There was a landowner who put his top employees in charge of his holdings. He said to them, “Take charge of it – and take care of the place. Bring your families to live on the land, and enjoy its produce. Serve it faithfully, and from its care you will live abundantly.”

So the servants came on board. They lived on the land, and raised families there. They were as fertile as the land itself and they grew in numbers. And it was theirs for the taking – to take charge of, to take care of, or to take advantage of – and with the land they served as their home they would live in hope and abundance, or in fear and scarcity – it was up to them.

What will they say when the landlord comes? How will they be with him? As servants entering into joy, or as sad stewards with empty fields, exhausted resources, and mistreated fellow creatures, to show for their stewardship?

We are familiar now with the data and analysis that have exposed to our concern the phenomenon of climate change. It is a transnational challenge that faces us on a global front. Many of the crises and problems facing humanity on occasional or local bases connect to this root phenomenon: we live in the Age of the Anthropocene. 

Human activity shapes geography, climate, biosphere – and even geology. We are making, through our collected and cumulative activities, a permanent impact on the landscape of our world: its ice and free water, its air and clouds, its land and growing things (including food for ourselves and all other animal creatures), and hence the sustainability of life for ourselves and our fellow beings.

Recently I attended a meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego. I met a  Turkish seminarian from Istanbul, an exchange student in the United States, who told me he’d polled his fellow students: If you saw a cricket in your room what would you do? Ninety percent said, I’d kill it. 

And these were seminarians!  he exclaimed. What became of compassion for all creatures?

Let us not make the Anthropocene the anthropocentric. Let us remember our special mandate as human creatures to care for the earth: not just to multiply and fill it – but to tend it. We are the stewards, the workers in the garden, of this green and gold, and glorious, blue white planet. It is our home, but not as owners – not as exploiters – but as chief tenants. We are the manager of the apartment house, so to speak, not the landlord. 

We look forward to the return of our landlord, with joyful expectation but also some anxiety. Our anticipation is mixed with feelings of loss and grief – and even guilt. In our Christian hope we turn to that landlord and yearn for his presence. 

As preparatory work for the hope that is born in us through faith, we must acknowledge our failures – perhaps irrecoverable, some of them – as stewards, even brothers and sisters, to earth and our fellow created beings. 

But our Christian perspective, even in the kingdom of anxiety that is this world, is that we can do something still worthwhile, small and large, in our collective identity and our solitary pursuits, to move toward the day of his coming with rejoicing – a welcome made possible only because we do not stand alone. 

God is indeed already with us – in our suffering and elation, our watchfulness and neglect.

What we face now with environmental catastrophe is unprecedented in scale, possibly, but not in moral quality or human impact. A famine up close is a hungry village, a starving face, and a child with no solace. A forest fire or a drought is in aggregate a great disaster. 

But, again, up close it is the tragedy of each creature swept up and away by destructive forces. Each of us has stories to tell, and promises to keep, on the human level – efforts token or tiny that help us forward as we confront the common foe. Together – as we band together – there are large things we can do even yet to make the world a better place.

Maybe the time of changing light bulbs is over, as enough. But the time of the Anthropocene, as geologists call this our human-fashioned epoch, has just begun. 

We too easily indulge in a self-delusion: self-delusion about the place of humanity in creation. We are deluding ourselves if we think our self-assumed pose of superiority to the rest of creation is something mandated in the Bible. 

Genesis 2:15 (CEB): The Lord God took the human being and settled him in the garden of Eden to farm it and to take care of it.

In other words, we are both to cultivate the land and to take custody of it as servants of the Lord. We are stewards of the earth, caretakers and custodians. 

We are God’s representatives, or images, in creation, so exercising that stewardship is a servant role, subservient to the true land Lord of the universe. We have power to alter the world but we depend on the earth and its life for survival. 

Our “rule” is subordinate – submissive to God and God’s will for creation – God’s will, not our own.

Take care, take charge. Fill the earth, be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth. And delight in it.

May this day be holy, good, and peaceful.

May the creative spirit of the universe

enliven us with hope.

May the nurturing spirit of the universe

compel us to care for creation - and each other.

May the valiant spirit of the universe

imbue us with the fortitude

to see the truth,

and the wisdom

to act upon it.

JRL+  

The Rev. Dr. John Leech is Priest Associate at the Episcopal Church of Saint Matthew in Tucson and is a member of the Creation Care Council of the diocese of Arizona.

The Episcopal Church Foundation posted a version of this essay on its Vestry Papers: Caretakers of God's Creation website https://www.ecfvp.org/vestry-papers/article/996/stewards-of-the-earth edited by Sandra Montes, on April 6th 2022.

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)

Creation Care Prayer

Here's a little prayer I wrote -

Creation Care - Invocation

May this day be holy, good, and peaceful.

May the creative spirit of the universe

enliven us with hope.

May the nurturing spirit of the universe

compel us to care for creation - and each other.

May the valiant spirit of the universe

imbue us with the fortitude

to see the truth,

and the wisdom

to act upon it.

JRL+

http://celtimergent.blogspot.com/2019/05/creation-care-prayers.html

State of the planet is not good

"The state of the planet is: broken."--UN secretary general on December 2nd.

The planet is burning. The planet is freezing. The planet is drowning. The planet is asphyxiating. The planet is poisoned.

Humanity must turn away from its headlong course of environmental suicide. What humanity has brought about, humanity can also help to heal.

The defining task of humanity for this century is to heal its relationship with the rest of nature. “There is no vaccine for the planet.”

That was the message in the 'state of the planet' address by the UN secretary general.

What can we as people of conscience, as people of faith, as citizens and human beings, do to bring healing to the planet?

We can begin by hands-on action such as community gardens, recycling, and careful use of resources, and work within our community organizations, civic associations, and religious congregations, not only to act locally, but to advocate policies that address the climate emergency: goals of carbon neutrality, food security, adaptation and resilience.

John Leech

Foothills

As printed in the Letters to the Editor, Arizona Daily Star, Tuesday, December 8, 2020, A5.

The State of the Planet

"The state of the planet is: broken."--UN secretary general on December 2nd.

The planet is burning.

The planet is freezing.

The planet is drowning.

The planet is asphyxiating.

The planet is poisoned.

Humanity must turn away from its headlong course of environmental suicide.

What humanity has brought about, humanity can also help to heal.

The defining task of humanity for this century is to heal its relationship with the rest of nature. “There is no vaccine for the planet.”

That was the message in the 'state of the planet' address by the UN secretary general.

What can we as people of conscience, as people of faith, as citizens and human beings, do to bring healing to the planet?

We can begin by hands-on action such as community gardens, recycling, and careful use of resources, and work within our community organizations, civic associations, and religious congregations, not only to act locally, but to advocate policies that address the climate emergency: goals of carbon neutrality, food security, adaptation and resilience.

* * *

António Guterres (UN Secretary-General) on the State of the Planet

2 Dec 2020 -  Speech by António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, on the State of the Planet at Columbia University (New York City).

http://webtv.un.org/live-now/watch/ant%C3%B3nio-guterres-un-secretary-general-on-the-state-of-the-planet/6213596409001/

As submitted as a letter to the editor of the Arizona Daily Star on Friday 4 December 2020. JRL+

State of the Planet

"The state of the planet is: broken."--UN secretary general this morning.

The planet is burning.

The planet is freezing.

The planet is drowning.

The planet is asphyxiating.

The planet is poisoned.

Humanity must turn away from its headlong course of environmental suicide.

What humanity has brought about, humanity can also help to heal.

The primary task of humanity for this century is to heal its relationship with the rest of nature.

That was the message this morning in the 'state of the planet' address by the UN secretary general.

What can we as churches, as people of God, do to bring healing to the planet?

* * *

António Guterres (UN Secretary-General) on the State of the Planet

2 Dec 2020 -  Speech by António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, on the State of the Planet at Columbia University (New York City).

http://webtv.un.org/live-now/watch/ant%C3%B3nio-guterres-un-secretary-general-on-the-state-of-the-planet/6213596409001/

embodied faithfulness

 

heart

Jesus said, "The first commandment is this: Hear, O Israel:

The Lord your God is the only Lord. Love the Lord your

God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your

mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: Love

your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment

greater than these."    Mark 12:29-31

 

The new youth pastor of a church in Palo Alto spoke to a group of high school students gathered at Mount Hermon Camp and Conference Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and drawing on Romans (somehow) made a diagram with his hands and forearms, showing a triangle whose points (self, others, God) drew closer together: as you become closer to God you become closer to others; as you become closer to others you become closer to God. I have not forgotten that in 49 years, though that preacher is long retired.

But I would submit, today, an addition to his chart: as we become closer to God or one another we also become closer to our selves - our true selves, anchored in Grace, visible or invisible, sought or not. For as every Southerner knows...

[On the causeway between Daphne and Mobile Alabama, in the middle of Mobile Bay, is a good old diner that serves breakfast. I ordered ham and eggs, and sure enough when the waitress brought me breakfast there were grits on the plate. "But I didn't order grits." - "You don't have to, honey. Grits just come."*]

... grace just comes. It is inexorable as the love of God and we might as well admit it. And if we do -

[Archbishop Desmond Tutu spoke at the Trinity West conference at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and said that like many preachers he had only one sermon: his was "God loves you." But the implications of that ...]

- if we do admit the unbreakable unfathomable inexorable grace of God, there are implications for our behavior, toward God, others, and even ourselves.

We can no longer be party to the hate we have absorbed in the past. We must work toward healing, of ourselves, yes, but not through a Ministry of Self-esteem: through the experience of love in action. 

Giving and receiving, noticing, acknowledging, practicing, experiencing, love in action: grace.

And that grace we experience in and through our fellow creatures. 

The famous situation-ethicist Joseph Fletcher summed up his message in a single phrase, which makes more sense now, in light of what we've covered above. He wrote: "Love God in your neighbor."

Because love in reality, though harsher than love in dreams, is indeed grace: it is the proper working out of the good news of Jesus Christ in the world. The beloved community he calls us into - beloved by God, first of all, with all else to follow - is not yet but already being fulfilled in the world.

Love in action is the work of the Holy Spirit, grace working in us, doing more than we could hold in our own arms, do with our own hands, embrace with our own minds: except God is always at work in us.

Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.   Ephesians 3:20, 21

It is not always easy to see. In the midst of crises - pandemic, political foolishness or uproar, climate worries, cancer or other personal tragedies - that seem to come upon us in waves or from ambush, it is not always easy to see the love of God at work.

 

In the misadventures of our lives, the misanthropy of our fellow humans, the profound or casual discourtesies we experience in interactions with strangers - or loved ones, the cruel moments in our lives, it is not always easy to see God's love at work.

 

We have to build on it. On what we can see - and what we cannot - as we follow the way of love. That is the pathway blazed by the Patriarchs, emboldened by the Kings, laid wide and straight through the wilderness of mercy by the power of God. It is the door opened by the saving action of the life of Jesus Christ. And it is the way trod before us by millenia of believers, of the saints - of all the saints and souls we celebrate this coming All Saints and All Souls (El Día de los Muertos) weekend. 

 

We remember those who love us - and those who cannot. We remember those who remain unloved and unknown - except by God. 

 

Let us then remember more than those we know - and make our behavior bend toward grace, toward the working out in the world of that grace, experienced and received, through love in action, collective, common, individual or corporate. 

 

Let us look at crises of our day with new eyes, and new will to win through to the kingdom of grace. Let us look at blessings with new eyes, receiving and giving and loving together, in the light of God's love.

 

And let us not forget: that every time we grow closer to God we grow closer to each other; every time we grow closer to one another, in the love and grace of God at work in the world, we grow closer to God.

 

And in that gathering unity in the heart of God we come to know truly ourselves.

 

soul

Looking at the first reading for this coming Sunday, October 25, 2020, I see again that the Shema begins with an admonishment to holiness. Before there is even a command to love God or your neighbor there is the invitation, be holy, for God is holy and you are the people of God. 

Well how about it? What does that mean?

It means love in action. It means knowledge that we can act upon (actionable knowledge) : knowing that God loves us - first - gives us call to respond to that inexorable love with our own inadequate but willing and blessed love in turn.

It means embodied faithfulness. That is, not just words, "Lord, Lord" - but deeds. Love in action. 

Our faith in God, our steadfast love (chesed), is shown in how we live and how we pray and how we treat one another (and ourselves). So to love your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength, as Jesus summarizes the law, is to embody that first loyalty in how we choose to live.

 As is pointed out more frequently these days that means not just individual but collective choices, and individual choices that feed the common good. 

Wearing a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic is an action for the common good; it is embraced faithfulness. The mask protects those around me, pretty well, along with the other precautions - social distancing, frequent hand washing, testing and tracing and treating  ... it is not for me alone.

So much for rugged individualism! We need to work together, with God and our neighbor, for the love of God and neighbor and self... that is how embodied faithfulness works.

mind

In his keynote presentation Saturday to the convention of the diocese of western Washington, indigenous ministries leader Bradley Hauff said some things about love. 

 

The Jesus Movement of which we Anglicans & Episcopalians are an integral part emphasizes 

•     loving

•     liberating

•     life-giving

on our way to becoming the Beloved Community that Martin Luther King Jr described as a diverse community embodying "a global vision in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth."

Bradley Hauff - an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux - reminded us that all things are our relatives - not just people, all creation. 

And that means that the double commandment Jesus proclaims in the gospels - love God and your neighbor - extends beyond traditional limited understanding of neighbor as fellow Israelite or even sojourner in the land, to other nations, other creatures, and indeed to all of creation. 

"Brother Sun, Sister Moon" is no longer merely a metaphor or a nice song. It is for real: we are all related - in God's love. And as God is love that love is all encompassing, all embracing. While we experience separation from others and from God, and a need for redemption and reconciliation, we believers know that 'there is no better redeemer than Christ'. 

We are all relatives, thanks to Jesus, and we are striding toward right relationship with God, humanity, and all creation.

 

Jesus responds to his Pharisaic interrogator by quoting Scripture, from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, for the first and second commandments he articulates. And when he says heart and soul and mind - and strength - he draws on all aspects of human nature. Heart: the more responsive and emotional reactions of a human being; Soul: the vitality and consciousness of a person; Might: the powerful and instinctive drive in our nature; and Mind: the intelligent and planning qualities of a person.

When we hear that we are to love God with all of ourselves, we are called into a transformation, a conversion, a taking of responsibility for the growth and development of all aspects of ourselves, as persons, in heart, soul, mind, and strength, and as the people of God's love.

 

Let us not then as we go forth into the new world of love's redeeming work that it is the love of God, source of all being, eternal Word, and holy Spirit, into which we are called to live; and on that love we draw in our embodied faithfulness, our love in action, toward friend and stranger, and all of creation.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all evermore. Amen.    2 Corinthians 13:14

Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.    Ephesians 3:20,21

 

For St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Tucson, the Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost, 2020.

https://www.earlpalmer.org/

http://edgeofenclosure.org/proper25a.html

*Apocryphal southern story - except for the meal. The grits were excellent.

The call to love God is the heart of faith, and yet it is not disembodied. Loving God manifests itself in love of neighbor. (Diana Butler Bass, The Cottage, October 24, 2020)

• Bradley Hauff’s Keynote video: https://youtu.be/dHzxvJrIbJY