Saturday, June 20, 2009

Celebration for a Home

















Almighty and everlasting God, grant to this home the grace of your presence, that you may be known to be the inhabitant of this dwelling, and the defender of this household; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
(“Celebration for a Home,” Book of Occasional Services, Church Publishing, 2004)

Yesterday evening, 24 of us gathered to bless the new home of Lisa and Colin, which they share with Concrete, and with other guests from time to time. The blessing was a joyful event, culminating in a celebration of the Eucharist, and followed by supper provided by our hosts.

Everyone there knew that Colin and Lisa have asked for their church family's help to discern what form God wants their ministry of hospitality to take. This is appropriate: we all need each other’s prayers, listening ears, thoughtful questions, and love as we seek to live out our vocations. I’ve accompanied Lisa and Colin in this phase of their discernment for several months now, and I believe they are called to offer hospitality in their home. What form that hospitality will take over time, none of us knows, but we trust that will be revealed.

This ministry is one of the ways our sister and brother are called to live out Jesus Christ’s command to each of us to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength….and your neighbor as yourself.” This ministry is deeply personal, affecting Colin and Lisa’s marriage and daily life, but it isn’t individual, or private. It’s an outgrowth of the ministries of fellowship and hospitality which I found at the heart of St. Joseph’s when I arrived in 2006, and which have grown since then. And so it involves all of us.

Our involvement may take a variety of forms. I hope you will all include Lisa and Colin’s process of discernment in your prayers for our parish family. Pray that they, and all of us, may answer God’s call faithfully, whatever form that call may take—and then let Colin and Lisa know what you hear in response to your prayers.

You may be moved to support this ministry in other ways: lending DVDs for guests to watch, dropping off a container of soup when you’re making some for your own household, or stopping by to check on the household while Colin and Lisa are away next month.

Wayne and I provide a modest amount of material support for the house, as a way of affirming its beauty as a sign of God’s in-breaking reign. That support doesn’t reduce our contributions to the St. Joseph’s budget, the poor plate, the flower fund, or any other collection through which our ministries are funded. It’s our response to a call, in a conversation that will continue. Thanks be to God.
--Rhonda

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Musings on a week lived in faith

Looking back over the past week I am reminded of "the curate's egg" - good in parts.

Ups and downs, peaks and troughs or whatever you want to call them, are part of life. It's how we cope with not only the low points, but even the highs, that can make all the difference to others. Both Gail and I experienced unrelated frustrations towards the end of last week. Talking to friends not only helped both of us get past these difficulties (as minor as they were, in hindsight), but hopefully gave those friends a sense of helping and of being "wanted". It's a reminder that we all not only need, but rely on, one another. Seeking help is not always easy, but is generally rewarding for both the seeker and helper. Thank God for the family of friends we have and love.

As this wonderful world continues to turn, a dear friend's younger brother died on Saturday and yesterday another friend gave birth to a beautiful girl, Macy. Lows and highs, mourning and rejoicing, they are an integral part of life . . . and death.

As Gail says every morning "Good morning life . . . how can I make a difference today?"

--Mick Capon

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The Patient Kingdom

The following is a sermon preached by Leigh Edwards, a parishioner of St. Joseph's, at Oriental United Methodist Church, on 14 June 2009. The text is Mark 4:26-34. We pray for Leigh as she serves her internship at Oriental UMC.

I lived last year in a neighborhood known by people outside of the community, and even by some inside, for its drugs, gangs, poverty, and violence. In fact, the house that we resided in used to be a boarding house – which was a veiled way of talking about a transitory location for those looking for some kind of comfort in drugs, sex, or just a roof over their heads. There is a lot next to our house that is long, skinny and weed covered – the neighborhood association is not sure what to do with it – and it is exactly the kind of lot that you would tell your kids to stay away from and that would necessarily bring down adjacent property value. People used it as a thoroughfare from further back in the neighborhood to the bus stop, and often probably for other sorts of business. Once in a while TROSA would come by and clean the lot, though its general state was weed and trash covered. A friend of ours from the neighborhood buried a dead cat that was found on our sidewalk there. In the process he discovered, or was reminded, that even feet down in the dirt it was filled with broken glass, cigarette butts, old tires, bottles, candy wrappers, and even the occasional appliance. The lot had seen the passing of years, and had a lot of stories to tell from the neighborhood. The lot was a mess.

One of my roommates, probably the most contrarian of them all, decided to build a garden, and to build one right there on that lot that we did not own. He spent a week filtering the dirt through the wires of an abandoned shopping cart, just to make it safe to grow seeds in. The plot was maybe 3 feet by 2 feet and framed by discarded white boards. Old bottles were used to help support the raised bed. Thanks to the labor of our housemate, near the end of spring our house was able to enjoy salad greens that were grown in the polluted dirty lot next to our house. It was an unlikely little ray of hope in the midst of abused and trashed land.

I see what my roommate did with that tiny garden plot as embodying the aspects of the kingdom that Jesus describes in the two parables of our gospel lesson today. In the first parable a farmer scattered seed on the ground. The parable says “he does not know how” the seed grows. However, what I suspect the parable is saying is what the farmer actually does know: that he can do only so much in the growth of the seed. It is the work of the earth, sun and rain to produce and bear the fruit of good wheat. The second parable of the mustard seed is meant to be read right in line with the first. In it a tiny seed, contrary to our notions of relative input and output, produces one of the most lush and helpful plants in the garden. The wheat is not so different for, like the mustard shrub and most other plants, it comes from a relatively small beginning. The mustard seed is the same as the wheat because, like the wheat, it grows not on its own but because of reasons not completely understood even by the most learned farmer: the richness of the earth, the heat of the sun, the work of the animals, and the biological inner workings of the seed. There are three aspects of the Kingdom of Heaven illustrated by these parables: faith, hope, and patience. The last one, patience, is probably the hardest one for us to get, as it rests upon hope and faith. It is also one of the most vital and one of the most reflective of who God is. At the end I will return to why I see a tiny garden in the middle of an abandoned lot may be such a patience filled endeavor towards the kingdom of God.

The farmer in the first parable does a completely unremarkable thing. He sows some seeds. It is a normal task for a large, though decreasing, part of the population. It is something that we take for granted as consumers of agricultural products. The farmer plants the seeds, knowing he is not responsible for yielding the whole product and with the knowledge that there are things that he simply cannot control. This is faith. Faith is to know that ultimately someone or something else is in control of the outcome, or in theological language, is omnipotent. We have a part to play – to plant the seeds. The farmer should plant the seeds well, deeply, with sufficient room to grow and in soil that has been properly rotated, lain fallow for a year perhaps, and is respectful of the many systems around it that sustain it. Still, ultimately, no matter what the farmer does the seeds will grow or not grow. There is something bigger.

Faith is a large burden off of our shoulders. Faith in God means that we believe that God’s plans have already been accomplished through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are not in charge of saving the world. Faith means that, guided well in how to plant our seeds, take care of the land we are given, and graciously care for our plots we are not burdened with the tasks of causing the inner workings of the seed to grow. If we live well, work well and play well we do our parts.

However, as the saying goes, even Satan believes in God. So what makes us so different as Christians? I would suggest that the mustard seed provides us with a pretty great response to that – hope. Hope seems to be a dangerous word these days, especially with so many people losing jobs. What, really do we have to hope in? When we daily see women who feel they cannot purchase milk for home, one quarter of this county in poverty, women and men scouring want ads for work, and violence ravaging many nations across the globe, we have to ask: is hope naïve?

It depends on what kind of hope you are talking about. One type of hope will tell us, given an apparently “bad” situation, that those particular bad things will magically get better. This type of hope tends to offer shallow words of comfort to victims of suffering, to downplay hardship, and to insist that there is some solution in grasp if only we can see it. I like to call this type of hope “optimism.” God is not optimistic, God is sure. God has a different type of hope, a theological hope. This is the hope of sitting with people who are broken hearted even if we cannot do a single thing for them. This is the hope that gives when asked, not knowing what really may come of it. This is the hope that befriends those in poverty if only because Jesus told us that is where he would find them. This hope is the planting of a mustard seed. It is a hope of certainty, a hope that when we act faithfully a shrub will emerge. Not any shrub, either, but a beautiful, lush, sheltering shrub that we, (remember the wheat?), may not know how it will grow. Hope is to not only know that you do not have control over the outcome but to delight in it! The outcome belongs to the most gracious, loving and just being that exists: God. This is good news!

Sadly, however, these words – hope and faith – easily become trite words cross-stitched on pillows and thrown around to shallowly try to assuage pain, justify inflicting undue harm, or suppose that being a Christian is only embodied in donating money to the far off hungry while ignoring how our way of life contributes to this poverty. This is what makes the latter portion of the first parable so important. Faith and hope are, in Jesus’ parables, different foundations of patience. Faith and hope tell us why we must be patient and humbles us into remembering that our plans are not God’s plans. Human success is not God’s success and our rewards are not God’s rewards. Patience is ultimately about trusting God to take charge of what God does best.
In the first parable the farmer waits as stalk, head and grain are produced out of the tiny seed that was planted. This is so important. The wheat, and by association the mustard seed, continues to bloom in different ways. The plant is not harvested immediately, nor is it expected to be harvested immediately. The stalk looks little like that the final grain will be! More so, ultimately, the stalk will be discarded, though it was a necessary part of the plant’s growth. What, in the end may seem extra or unneeded was actually fundamental to the product. What is more important to remember is that God is the harvester. We may not know exactly what the final product will look like or when it will arrive, but we know it will be good. Like the farmer, we are asked to wait in patience before the harvest, tilling and caring for the crops.

A young couple a few years ago felt a call to go do mission work in the Middle East in a place that saw regular armed conflict. The couple was traveling in a convoy when they saw the truck behind them blow up. Searching for their friends they came into a village called Rutba that was inhabited by native people. The doctors nursed and cared for the injured people, free of charge. Full of gratitude the young man asked what they could pay the doctor. “Nothing,” the doctor replied, “just tell people about Rutba.” Overwhelmed, the couple returned to the United States and opened a house of hospitality in a racially divided town in North Carolina, encountering the messiness of reconciliation there. The house, now called Rutba house, houses many without homes, facilitates friendship across racial boundaries, offers two free community meals a week to whomever wishes to come, and helped begin a network of these sorts of places all across the country. The doctor in Rutba planted a mustard seed. He was not trying to create peace between the two sides in the war, and he did not kid himself to think that this action did not meant that more of his friends would not be killed later. More of his friends were probably killed by American soldiers. The doctor never saw, and never expected to see, any reward or fruit of his labor. He never saw the Rutba House. What’s more, the Rutba House may not even be the full fruit.

So hope and faith do not necessarily mean searching for quantifiable results, striving for product or improving standard of living - though these things may be important at some point be a part of what we do. Rather, being faithful may just mean getting to know the people around us who are different from us, using the small seeds we have and rejoicing in what God makes of them. Like the five loaves and two fish, or the mustard seed, what comes of what seems like impossibly small resources used in faith can be miraculous. We tend to speak today of ideas of efficiency, size, the best for the most amount of people. In other words, we presume to predict the future based on what we think we may have observed before. This is what science has taught us. We try to do the best, and “best” is defined by our own ideas of what is good at some finite time in the future.

So it may be difficult to justify spending time with people, being with others without a particular task at hand. We have an inclination to only do things that see immediate results. We want to give five dollars to the girl in the grocery line instead of befriending her to wonder why she is struggling financially. We form committees with those “less fortunate” in order to empower and help them, or send the homeless off to shelters. Rarely do we simply sit with and befriend our neighbors simply because they are our neighbors – it goes against every inclination of efficiency and success that our world runs out. But the church, in the words of Mother Theresa, is not called to be successful, but to be faithful. Success will come at some point as a result of being faithful, but it is not that for which we ought to strive. To choose to be with others instead of doing for them plants mustard seeds that are solely based on strong hope and sure faith. They allow us to witness in the most important way: to live so that, were there not a God, our lives would not make sense at all.

This can be overwhelming still – some people forever question whether or not they are being faithful enough without having some sort of graspable result. But we’re not saving the world, and we don’t have to do it all. We should not want to do it all. God calls us to plant just one mustard seed with the confident hope of the coming kingdom – regularly inviting one man to dinner who lives and eats routinely by himself, befriending a man you often see on the street and later finding he has come to live with you and your wife, or planting a minuscule garden in a seemingly barren and wasted plot of dirt.

This is why I see my roommate’s garden as a pretty good in-breaking of the kingdom. The garden was not planted to feed the entire community, or give teenagers something to do in the afternoon – both very good things – but instead did something beautiful, time consuming and good. He transformed a small part of a dirty lot, in some sense against the rules of the neighborhood association, but with the hope that it would be used for good. He had faith that it would grow something, hope that it would come into something good and is still sitting with the patience of what will come of that tiny garden plot, in a week, a year or ten years. One of our Latino brothers uses the phrase “Paciencia Ardiente,” or “ardent patience. This is an eager patience that realizes our integral and loving part in the kingdom, but a kingdom that is ultimately brought about not through our work but through the infinite love, patience, healing and justice of a relational God. This means planting your garden now and loving the garden, the earth, and the people who surround it instead of holding your own expectations. God is not optimistic, God is sure, and God’s wisdom is not human wisdom.

You may be used to hearing faith and hope used with the word love. Love is supreme, but often misunderstood. God loves us with a love that does not expect specific outcomes, but enjoys imagining fruit of goodness. It endures things that do not make sense, and lives with hope even when hope seems completely undeserved. That is why I leave love out, not because it is unimportant but because if you embody faith the size of a mustard seed, patience that humbly endures while still hoping a hope that refuses to shut off the possibility of good, you may be pretty darn close to love. You may be pretty close to the kingdom of God.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Celebrating Pauli Murray

On Wed., July 1, at 7 PM at St. Titus' Episcopal Church in Durham there will be a service to commemorate the life of The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray.

This will be a service of Holy Eucharist, with Bishop Michael Curry as the celebrant and Sarah Woodard as the deacon. The preacher will be Courtney Reid-Eaton, parishioner of St. Joseph's and Director of Exhibits at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke; she will compile and read selections from the sermons & writings of Pauli Murray.

Courtney testifies: “Pauli Murray has been a significant character in my life over the past few years. She was a Renaissance woman; a courageous person of action, intellect, and spirit, who used her gifts to further social justice and who strove to live as a fully integrated human being. She spoke her truths persistently. I am humbled to be invited to share her words and ideas with our community. Please hold me in your prayers over the next few weeks as I prepare.”

Please join in this celebration!

The following week, the General Convention of The Episcopal Church will consider a proposal to add The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray's feast day to the church calendar. The following biographical sketch was included in that resolution:

The Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray was a leader in the struggle for equal rights for women and African-Americans in the United States and throughout the world. She was also a lawyer, writer, poet, teacher, co-founder of the National Organization for Women, and the first African-American woman to be ordained priest by The Episcopal Church. Dr. Murray grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and on February 7, 1977, celebrated her first Eucharist in the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where her grandmother, Cornelia, had been baptized as a slave child. Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Shori celebrated the Holy Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross on February 7, 2007, in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of that ordination.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Space at the Table: Trinitarian Hospitality and Rublev’s Icon

Colin Miller
Trinity Sunday 2009
Isaiah 6:1-8, Canticle 13, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17

Today is Trinity Sunday. And “Trinity” is a word we use to describe God. So today is about God.

So my sermon will be about God. And I’m sure I will be exhaustive in my treatment.

We have already said and done lots of things today about God. We have blessed God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Perhaps you crossed yourself while you said that with three fingers held together to signify the one God who is three persons. In the Collect Rhonda proclaimed that we confessed God as eternal glorious Trinity, Father Son and Holy Spirit who lives and reigns forever and ever. The Gloria we often sing extols the Father and the Son and ends with a solemn bow at the praise of “Jesus Christ with the Holy Spirit in the glory of God the Father.” We will of course go on in the Creed to be most explicit about all of this. And then in the very heart of the Mass we will once again beg the Father to send his Holy Spirit upon bread and wine to make them the Body and Blood of Christ. The Eucharist itself is Trinitarian.

During the week we start each service of Morning and Evening Prayer by giving glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning is now and will be forever. We say the Apostle’s Creed: I believe in God, I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, and I believe in the Holy Spirit. We often close by asking that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. The officiant then bows and blows out the candles on the kneeler in front of a Trinitarian icon.

All this means that when we worship “God” we name thereby a very specific Divinity and therefore exclude many others. I give you three.

First, by “God” we do not name a perfect, all-powerful being who made everything, perhaps set it in good, scientific working order and sent it on its way to carry out its fated course, and whom it makes good sense to venerate in case he cares about things like that. Our God is not the biggest, abstract thing you can imagine, taking occasional interest in the world at really big events like wars and national elections, Duke-Carolina games. God is no more an old white man with a beard man than God is Morgan Freeman. That God is detached form the world, perhaps interested in strictly enforcing a moral code, or in meting out karma, or in condemning mean people or murderers or Hitler types.

And sometimes, even in churches that should know better, there is a variant on this which can look like the God we proclaim but is not. This is the second false god. For it rightly sets Jesus in some relation to God, but one which ends up simply making him a really good guy, or maybe even a special prophet God sent to give us an example of what it is to be moral, or loving, or who shows us once and for all that God love us, or who had a great social vision, or who really wanted to reform Judaism, or who just wanted to say that everyone is welcome, or that God’s nature is love after all. If this is all there is to Jesus, then we do not worship the Trinity.

Thirdly, but equally, to participate in Trinitarian worship is to deny that we all have a little spark of God within us which just needs the right care in order for us to reach our full potential. God is not a personal spirit or guardian angel that each one of us experiences differently, not the life-force which unites us all in a big bond of love and just wants us to tolerate each other. Oprah’s spirituality is not Trinitarian Orthodoxy.

You and I know that these gods and many others are on offer. But by coming to the Eucharist we proclaim that we belong to another.

Specifically, our God is one with a history of continuous and ongoing interaction with his creation. And to worship the Trinity is to claim that this interaction happened in a very specific, if peculiar, story that we tell, for instance, in the Eucharistic Prayer. Prayer B says that, as the culmination of his calling people of Israel and preaching through her prophets God the Father sent his Eternal Word, his Son Jesus, to be borne incarnate and to be the Savior of the world who delivered us from error, sin and death.

But just think for a moment about how strange that story is. God calls the tiny tiny people of Israel – a bunch of Egyptian serfs, preaches to them by his very strange prophets (we read a while back about Ezekiel laying on that brick for a year; you know –camel hair, wild locust, etc). The Father then sends something called his “Eternal Word.” First of all, why should God have an Eternal Word at all? What’s that? And this Word becomes human, without a biological father, by some poor 12 or 15 year old Jewish girl, and so thereafter is ever suspected of being a bastard. This Jesus guy was executed by the state, oh and by the way was also the savior of the world. The same prayer goes on to remind us that in this story the third actor, the Spirit, continually makes this same Jewish beggar present to us when we eat his flesh and drink his blood (no wonder the early Christians were accused of cannibalism). Moreover we hear that by such eating and drinking the Spirit makes the church into that same Jewish guy’s body: “living members of the body of the Son.”

This is the God we celebrate today.

What’s more, this God has this crazy story in spite of being in perfect harmonious communion of love among the Three Persons from all eternity. And what this takes us back to, actually, is that Trinitarian icon I mentioned earlier that seeks to display something of that eternal nature.

The Three Persons are gathered around a table. Table fellowship is at the very heart of God. The very divine nature has something to do with eating together. The eternal dynamism of that infinite power and love is displayed in nothing grander than a shared meal.

But then, if we draw our eyes back, and look at the gathering as a whole, we are struck by the fact that there appears to be space at the table for another. And this is where it is important that this icon actually portrays two moments at once. The name of the icon is the “Hospitality of Abraham”. At one and the same time it displays the Trinity and the story from Gen 18 of Abraham offering three strangers food, shelter and rest. And of course that this one image portrays these two things is anything but accidental. For to worship the Trinity is to worship a God who has provided hospitality for us and who even has left room at the table for us to commune with the divine nature.

And God does this by emptying himself and taking our nature. God has invited us in by assuming our very poverty, and by dying for us. The Trinity provides us hospitality by paying a high price. And of course, because God offers us such hospitality, St. Peter says that we become partakers of the divine nature.

And this means that we too will provide costly hospitality, for that is what the divine nature does. God has saved a place for us to commune with that divine nature that God is. But thereby God makes us hospitable. The Trinity takes on pain, poverty, sin, filth, and even death in order to fill an opening at the table. And we will do this because in it we will find the fulfillment of our deepest longing. In it we will find joy.

This means that St Rublev was right when he painted that icon that human nature most approaches the divine when it says with Abraham from Gen 18 “let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. And I shall bring a little food that you may refresh yourself.”

Thanks be to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

How dear to me is your dwelling, O Lord of hosts!

A few months ago, I asked a member of our community what had drawn her to visit St. Joseph’s, and to keep coming back. I expected she might answer that the location was convenient, or that she liked the small, intimate feel of the church. Her immediate answer, however, was something I wasn’t expecting. “It was the cardboard.” The cardboard? “Yes. When I saw sheets of cardboard leaning against the pillars of the walkway between the church and the parish hall, I knew immediately that this was a church that welcomed homeless people to sleep on its premises. That meant it was a church that was trying to be faithful. And that made it beautiful to me.”

This sister’s Gospel-trained eyes found beauty, not just in the stone façade of our church, or its stained glass windows, but above all in the flattened cardboard boxes leaning against its pillars. She found faithfulness in the most basic welcome the church can offer to people who have nowhere to call home. Her affirmation reminds us of our call to receive with open arms everyone who comes our way, as God has welcomed all of us, and it urges us to continue to practice the joyful, Spirit-filled discipline of loving one another as Jesus Christ loves us.

That way of life is a journey, not a destination, and the church is our starting point and the oasis to which we return again and again along the way. As we travel, we sing with the psalmist:

How dear to me is your dwelling, O LORD of hosts!
My soul has a desire and longing for the courts of
the LORD;
my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.

The sparrow has found her a house
and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young;
by the side of your altars, O LORD of hosts,
my King and my God.

Happy are they who dwell in your house!
they will always be praising you.

Happy are the people whose strength is in you!
whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.

--Rhonda

Breakfast 6.2.09

A large breakfast this morning, taking up both picnic tables. The day promises to be the first really hot one of the summer, with 95 degree temperature predicted. I could feel that insufferable heat beginning to build on my back as I walked over to Whole Foods after MP to get some cereal and juice.

G, who used to stay on the Hill, but who has found steady job at Arby’s and a decent room to stay in across town, came by early on his way to work for a bite to eat. (“The Hill” is what everybody calls the back parking lot at the church where everybody hangs out or sleeps. I guess specifically it refers to the sloped bank of the property that runs down west to the shops below, but I think any part of the grounds can be so called.) G was in particularly good spirits. He loves Sammie and talked to her as he helped us carry the breakfast supplies out into the courtyard. As we settled in we shook hands with a young newcomer who had stopped in recently. “Welcome to the Hill”, G said.

In no time there were 6 or 8 of us sitting around the table. Of course we went through the OJ immediately and had to switch to water. I told one guy that I had finally gotten my hands upon the clothing and boots that I “owed” him (he had stored some things in the church and someone else had taken them). I told them this time I’d keep them locked up tight in the Vicar’s office until he wanted to use them. Without places to shower or wash clothes, new, or at least clean used clothes from the Salvation Army or wherever, are one way to keep up some semblance of hygiene.

Everybody wondered where C was, and most of them know that he stays with me and so they asked me if I had any idea. I had to suppose he was still sleeping in his room and I hadn’t noticed. Yesterday I was tiptoeing around the house all afternoon thinking that he was taking an extended nap, only to find him sitting up on the Hill when I came to EP. “I thought you were in that room,” I said. He just laughed. I smiled joyfully.

Most of us finishing up our cereal and cheese grits that we get donated from a couple ladies at Blacknall Presbyterian, I started clearing things off and back into the Parish Hall. Most people helped, rinsing off dishes before putting them into the dishwasher. Afterward JR stood outside with one of the regulars talking about life. He’ll confide things to JR I don’t think anyone else knows, and JR will gently nudge him towards the path of wisdom. T, our Parish hall live-in sexton, always does an amazing job of keeping things in there spic and span, and humbly does any dishes that are left. These are the small works of mercy that constitute sanctity.

--Colin