Associate Rector’s Note: Where in the world is the Rev. Anne on Second Sundays?

The Rev. Anne Thatcher

Dear St. Martin’s,

You may or may not know that, prior to answering a call to St. Martin’s, I served a Spanish- and English-speaking congregation in Santa Ana, California. The growth of worship services in Spanish in the Episcopal Church continues across the nation and our diocese is no exception. Unfortunately, the number of clergy who are fluent enough to preach and celebrate the Eucharist in Spanish is limited. Due to this clergy shortage, churches with a Eucharist in Spanish within our diocese are often challenged with finding leadership for Sunday worship. 

Free Church of St. John in Kensington is one such congregation. In November of 2018, their vicar, the Rev. David Franceschi-Faccio, returned to Puerto Rico. For the interim, the Diocese of Pennsylvania Office of Transition Ministry has asked me to serve on the second Sunday of each month as the celebrant and preacher for their 11:15 a.m. Sunday Eucharist in Spanish. Free Church is a congregation comprised of both English- and Spanish-speaking members, with deep roots in the local Mexican and Puerto Rican community. This is a service full of joyous music with guitar accompaniment.

I will still be here until mid-morning on second Sundays to connect with you all, and then I will drive down to Free Church. I encourage you to consider visiting and worshipping with us on a second Sunday in the coming months. Their address is 3076 Emerald St., Philadelphia, 19134. Experiencing the Eucharist in another language is a way to begin to understand how worship both transcends and distinctly represents different cultures. You would be welcome to carpool with me to the church and back. I am also available to talk with you in more detail about this church and their engagement in the local community of Kensington.

In the coming months, I will share updates about the Free Church community.


Blessings for 2019,

The Rev. Anne Thatcher
Associate Rector

From Our Interim Rector: Wisdom for Dummies

If you’ve been in a bookstore lately, assuming you can find one, you’ll have noticed how many books there are with “Dummy” in the title. They first came on the market as self-help books for people new to computers who couldn’t understand a word of the manuals. They saved my sanity. Now they provide help on a wide range of subjects.

It says if we want wisdom, we have to start by knowing that we don’t know much. When we hear Wisdom’s servant girls calling out, “Yoo-hoo! Dummies!” we have to say, “That’s me! Here I am! Over here!” We have to admit we are dummies.

I see this week’s lesson from Proverbs as “Wisdom for Dummies.” Wisdom, it says, in the overview, is like a woman who builds a house, sets a table with bread and wine, and goes out into the street to invite all the dummies to come in and eat and drink and talk with her. Then, after they have learned enough to get started, she sends them out to get on with their lives according to what they figured out at the table.

It says wisdom isn’t something that can be packaged in a few verses or rules or slogans. It’s too big for that. People can’t come up and knock on the door of Wisdom’s house and be given a pat answer to take home with them like a trick or treat. They have to come in and sit down and talk through the issues they are struggling with.

It says no one person has all the answers, all the wisdom to tell us what to do. Only God does. Those struggling to find answers must discuss the questions with one another in Wisdom’s house, in the presence of Wisdom. They must listen to Wisdom, let Wisdom lead the discussion, as they talk and listen to one another.

It says that wisdom isn’t just something that lives in our heads and is fed by logic and words. It’s also something that lives in our guts and our souls. Wisdom feeds the seekers bread and wine at her table while they are talking. In the gospel, Jesus says in similar fashion that we gain life by eating his flesh and drinking his blood.

It says that wisdom is not just a bunch of facts we accept, or theories we believe, it’s the way we live our lives. As we say nowadays it’s, “walking the walk, not just talking the talk.” In this passage, Wisdom asks the seekers to, “live and walk in the way of insight.”

It all sounds very Episcopalian to me. It’s what I love about our church. I see the people of St. Martin’s grappling with wisdom this way every day: starting meetings with prayer; humbly sharing and listening to one another; centering our life together in prayer, meditation and the Eucharist; making a real effort to be agents of Christ’s love in the world. I feel wiser every day I’m here, and very grateful.

Blessings,
Rev. Phyllis Taylor

OHC and Me

Holy Cross Monastery in spring

As we approach our annual Lenten Retreat to Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York, I would like to share my feelings about this special place with the congregation. Holy Cross, for me, is what the Celts call a “thin place,” that is a place where God is especially accessible.

Here is my story…

In 1988, as a depressed and strung-out college junior I had a dream one night about Holy Cross Monastery based on a vague memory from a childhood visit. Though I was studying religion at the time I had abandoned the church and scoffed at faith. The day after this vivid dream, I called my mother and described the dream to her. She identified it immediately as Holy Cross. I asked her to book me a room for spring break that year leaving her completely baffled. 

I flew home to New Jersey between terms, took New Jersey Transit to New York and Metro North to Poughkeepsie, where a monk met me at the train station. Armed with a stack of books to defend myself against religion I set up camp in a room on the third floor. For some reason, however, I attended every worship service.  

Whether it was Matins, Vespers, Prime, or Compline, I always sat in the back row of the chapel, body turned resolutely away from the brothers, chagrined by all the religiousness and feeling self-righteous and "too smart for all this."  

To the surprise of the monks and myself, on my last day, I went up for the Eucharistic around the altar. Like St. Martin's, the community gathers around the table for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. At the passing of the peace I was overcome by God's loving presence and the divine desire to receive me. I sobbed through the Eucharistic Prayer as every word rang clear as a bell in my heart and mind. The mental image of a sharp, clean, silver needle passing a slender thread through the words and through my heart carried me through the emotionally wrenching moment. With God’s gentle, nurturing love overwhelming my resistance, my healing had begun.

After the dismissal, I bolted down to the Hudson and cried for an hour or so before a brother found me and got me to my train on time.

Holy Cross will forever be for me the place where God began to knit me back together again. I return there as often as I can because the grace I receive there helps me to grow deeper into the mystery of God. It is a place where God can polish my soul so it can glow with God’s light.

I hope you will consider attending our retreat in March. Perhaps you can give this retreat as a gift to your spouse. Take the kids for the weekend and give your beloved the chance for some renewal. Ask your teenage son or daughter – or college-aged child – if they would like to attend. They are most welcome. Find more information on the Wellspring page of StMartinEC.org.

- The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Rethinking Communion

For as long as I have seriously thought about Holy Communion, I have thought about it as a mostly personal portion of the service. The time leading up to Communion is probably the point in church when my focus is most drawn within myself. I spend that time reevaluating my relationship with God, recognizing how more often than not I have fallen short in many ways, and remembering that through Christ and his loving sacrifice on the cross I am offered forgiveness, hope, and a way to do better. Then, as I partake of Communion, I marvel at so much love, grace, and mercy being offered by someone so holy to someone as unholy as me.

That was the sum of my thoughts during Communion until two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, I went away to the Franciscan Spiritual Center for three days to dialogue with a small group of Christians from various theological and geographical places about sexual diversity in the church. After hours of sharing stories, thoughts, laughter, and tears with each other, we ended our last session with Communion.

As our facilitator held the bread and the cup to pass around our seated circle, she explained that before we passed the elements to the next person we were to say a blessing we wished for them to receive when they returned to everyday life. That one unfamiliar act she asked of us—to bless each other as we passed the body and blood of Christ—opened my eyes to a side of Communion I had never seen. Suddenly, Communion wasn’t simply about my relationship with God, it was also about my relationships within the body of Christ. Communion wasn’t simply a moment to consider how I could better reflect Christ, it was also a moment to consider how I had seen Christ reflected in the people around me.

As each person provided an intimate, unique blessing over their neighbor, I felt a sense of deep connection like I had never experienced during Communion. Here were thirteen people from different theological stances and approaches putting those differences temporarily aside in order to love each other, to love God together, and to jointly reconnect to that ultimate love evidenced by Christ on the cross. Here were thirteen people recognizing God at work in the people around them and praying that God would continue to pour into them and fill their needs. Here were thirteen people truly reflecting the body of Christ.

For the first time in my life, taking Communion was both deeply personal and deeply communal, and the more I think about it, the more I feel that is how Communion was meant to be. Personal, communal, and utterly sacred.

- Angelique Gravely

Don’t Take, Don’t Eat: A Case for Adoration

For our 20^th Anniversary my wife and I went to New York City and indulged in a few of our favorite things. We ate good food, spent an evening at the Metropolitan Opera, and immersed ourselves in art museums. My wife and I have the same approach to art museums. Our pace is lugubrious; we spend up to 10 or 15 minutes with a single painting, relating to it from different distances and angles. Our attitude is reverent and our experience is a quiet form of ecstasy, a communion with God mediated by beauty. Just try to pry me away from a Rothko.

What was new for us on this pilgrimage to MOMA was the inability of our peers to also be present in the moment with the art. We were shocked by the number of people recording the art with cameras and phones. There in front of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” patron after patron stopped only long enough to take a ‘selfie’* with the masterpiece. Others stalked the gallery and only observed the painting through their view finders. 

The new cultural practice on display seemed profoundly sad to me. Why record your presence with this great artistry if you were never present to it in the first place? The cultural practices of consumerism and individualism had decidedly invaded the place. The point of viewing art had been transformed from a perspective of revelation from beyond ourselves that draws us into a new space of thought, feeling, and spirit to a perspective of documenting the fact that “I was present here,” and “I saw this” and “I have this to take home.”

The goal was to take and to have. The significance came from showing I was present to an absent audience. 

Maybe I am a premature curmudgeon, but I found this behavior appalling and deeply concerning. When a man took video of Monet’s “Water Lilies” by panning across the room-sized panels, I said to myself, “Do you know what you are missing?” Others in the room were slowed down and almost forced to sit in awe of Monet’s rendering of time and eternity, heavens and earth comingled on the radiant surface of his pond at Giverney.  

The room with the “Water Lilies” was a thin place of transcendent possibility. There is no taking or having or inserting self, there is no capturing, not even in words or music. There is experiencing, being present, being captured by the art and taken away by it, beyond ourselves.

This is adoration. Adoration is a form of prayer where we are pulled from our pre-occupation with self and occupied with love and awe for what gestures toward God. In the Church of the Middle Ages the consecrated bread and wine of communion were often reserved for adoration and most regular folk only adored the host and did not consume it all. Being in relationship with the gift Christ gave – the gift of his life – was enough inspiration and nurture for the adoring soul.

Now, this path of adoration was fairly alien to me until I had my experience at MOMA, where taking and consuming had become the dominant patterns of relating. It made me think; what if adoration is good medicine for our consumption-sick souls and society? We certainly need alternative ways of behaving that are not so fiercely desirous of satisfaction by possession and which almost always cause us to feel emptier in the end.

There is that brief moment where taking and having give us a great rush of pleasure. Our will to power is effective and builds up our ego. Almost always the feeling wears off as one more form of false transcendence. Indeed, the possessing often becomes a burden or only is reactivated as a pleasure when another person notices what we own and gives us a flash of pride.

Don’t take, don’t eat. Jesus says the opposite when he offers himself to us in the meal that remembers his sacrifice for us. He says, “Take, Eat, this is given for you.” We are blessed to take and eat every Sunday and to be fed by Christ, reminded that our life is a gift given and not our possession. However, just as I am suspicious of middle class/bourgeois folks claiming, “God is with me” in an easy way, I am suspicious of folks addicted to consumption adding Christ to the list of things we consume. What if the path and prayer of adoration – not taking, not eating – could be a corrective spiritual path for what ails us?

- The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

*A ‘selfie’ is when you extend your camera out from your body and take a picture of yourself with another person, alone, or in a special place.