Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church

Polar Bears and Burmese Monks

Polar bears and Burmese monks wouldn’t seem to have much in common, except they both break my heart open. And I don’t know that there’s much I can do for either except pray, which brings me right up to the part of me that doesn’t believe, that says, “Any God who won’t save these without our saying, ‘Please,’ lots of times isn’t good enough.” And then my heart breaks some more, which I suspect is it’s own kind of prayer.

And I cast around for some way to believe and some way to pray. It helps, I think, that I was raised Protestant in the South, because we learned to take Bible verses seriously. Single, isolated, disjointed Bible verses, the kind that come back to me when I’m trying to figure something out or digest an elephant, most recently, suffering. Verses that I hold in mind in a crypto-King James Version because that’s how they generally came to me.

“The prayers of the righteous availeth much” has been offering a handhold recently. I can try to explain it, in a way that doesn’t make God a capricious, indecisive tyrant swayed by heartfelt pleas, by recourse to half-baked theories of electromagnetic energy. But at least this opens me again to intentional intercessory prayer, something I’m currently finding difficult, just as I’m finding it difficult to pray for myself and the very real mental and physical consequences of this summer’s accident, surgeries, and hospitalizations—and now convalescence.

That, and “A thousand years are as a day in thy sight,” give me some hope of making it through. May our fervent prayers rise for the beautiful and the innocent, the noble and the brave, in the hope that they too make it through to God’s good shalom, for which our broken hearts yearn.

Last night Nancy and I went to the Arcade Fire concert down at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View. For those of you who haven’t heard of them, Arcade Fire is an “indie” band from Montreal, touring in support of their second album, Neon Bible. I say “indie,” because clearly, if they’re headlining at Shoreline, they’re pretty damn big. And they are numerous on stage as well… I counted ten musicians, since their music has an unusual amount of orchestration in it. I won’t really go on to describe the band anymore, since you either know it already or can check it out pretty easily.

Arcade Fire belongs on the list of bands that I think of as “crypto-Christian,” along with Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, and more obvious candidates such as U2 (which, yes, now falls into the old fart category, sorry to have to tell you) or lesser known bands such as Woven Hand or Sufyan Stevens. Some of these musicians are semi-openly Christian (like Sufyan Stevens, who is, I think, an Episcopalian) while their music is not particularly obviously religious. Others, like Gary Numan, might say they are strongly opposed to Christianity, but you can hear them furiously and authentically engaging with God in every piece of music (for example, some of the songs Numan wrote after his wife miscarried). While a few of the lesser known bands may have had a boost in their early performing careers by being linked to the “Christian” circuit, most of them have avoided it like the plague, seeing the association as imposing a permanent cap on how wide their popularity might become.

And yet, they sing about dealing with suffering, their conflicted desires (here I think of Morrissey’s swoony ballad “I Have Forgiven Jesus"), and a sense of wonder that runs through the world. Even when they don’t sing about God or church per se (and even if they don’t go to church, and even if they’d be insulted if you kept pushing the subject), they sing from what I’d call a Christian imagination, formed in a worldview permeated with meaning and spiritual possibility. I’m not saying that they’d identify their muse in this way themselves, of course, but I certainly find a lot to feed my own imagination there as well.

by Lynn Park
Yesterday I resumed my daily photo list for the first time since my hip fracture in June, and because it’s been so long and so much has happened, I enclosed a note. I said I’d been afraid my eye was so dry I couldn’t see anything and how happy I was to have been proved wrong.
Sara Miles, bless her, copied that note to the Pastoral Care list and added a prayer for my healing and the continued refreshing of my vision, “so that we may all see more clearly.”
And even if my eye has been able to see, for which I thank God, it has still been a long dry season and now, for the first time in months, I find myself repeating, finding in the murmur of my heart, “My Lord and my God.” Something that I cannot explain eases, if only for the moment. It’s as if I’d forgotten something I used to know, and now I remember. I who was dead am now alive.

OUR STORIES
This month, Dave Cowan interviews Renee Billingslea.
..."I’ve never lived so far from a home church. We look at the drive as family time together. Forty minutes really isn’t that long, because St. Gregory’s provides the entire family with the spiritual food we all need. It offers the diversity our family enjous, and has a world feeling I’ve never found in any other church....”

September Nyssa News