The Saturday evenings before I am the scheduled preacher are a time of considerable anxiety for me. I start preparing my sermon on the previous Sunday afternoon, researching, praying, holding myself open to God’s Word in the words of the appointed text. I live with them all week long; bits and pieces suggest themselves to me at unexpected times and I scramble to jot them down lest I forget.   Almost always, though, it’s on Saturday evening that my message crystalizes, comes into the kind of sharp focus I need to speak from the pulpit. I concentrate and pray, and sweat more than a little, caught between clarity and fear I will run out of time to marshal my thoughts into some kind of coherence.

Last night was not different than others, this time with a little added pressure because this is the Sunday after. The Sunday after an articulate, gifted preacher and rector celebrated at our services one last time before heading on to his new congregation. We are in the process of finding an interim rector and for now, I’m the clergy person on staff. I very much wanted to do it right today.

At the same time, though, I had noticed how beautiful the light was out in the garden as night fell and we were free of rain. I had been able to go out and take some pictures of the patch of sunflower I planted early this spring. They’ve taken a pounding from all the rain we’ve had, but there are still plenty where our bees can feast.

Against that backdrop, first I got a text. Someone I know and care for immensely is very sick. This person will have tests tomorrow that probably will only serve to confirm much of what’s already known and the news is not good. The family is very private so I’m sure reaching out to me was not easy. I was grateful to hear I could bring my friend communion and visit with the family after church today.

Then the phone rang. This time, the conversation was in Spanish—a conversation I had pretty much figured I wouldn’t get to have with a young woman I’ve met a couple of times. A member of the Latino community has also been very, very sick.   There had been some question about me stopping to visit him in the hospital. Then, some conversation about the possibility of a baptism. Then, nothing. Yesterday it all came together. This person has gone into renal failure and a kidney transplant is not an option. Friends and family have gathered the resources to pay for him to return to Mexico to spend the handful of days he has left with his family at home.

But he wanted to be baptized, and for reasons that are filled both with mystery and grace, he wanted to be baptized at Ascension. I asked for the basic information I need to fill out the baptismal registry and it was he who texted back. I was surprised because he has a quaint and old-fashioned name; I took for granted this was a person rich in years.  He was born in 1994. He is 23 years old.

I did not see him at communion and I had not seen him come in earlier so as I went through our service this morning, I wondered if he would be able to make it. And then, as we processed out, singing “The Church’s One Foundation”, there he was. An achingly beautiful, achingly young man.

I was grateful for the members of our church who stayed and participated in a baptism that was in Spanish. Because literacy is an issue in the part of the Latino community I serve these days, I have modified the Rite of Baptism so what we normally say and  the way in which we recite the Nicene Creed are now questions that can be answered with a simple, “Sí”. About 30 of us gathered around the baptismal font and around this young man. I want to believe that in that gathering, we held grace. We were a space of safety. We were a people willing to be present with someone who is dying and be there in solidarity and compassion, not looking away from what is harsh and painful about life.

When the baptism was over, the young man’s family took a number of pictures, he holding the candle we’d lit from the paschal candle—a small flame from the larger one that reminds us that the light of God’s love is stronger than death or darkness. There was weeping. At first, the young man was very distant, already far into his journey to a place he goes to by himself. Towards the end of the time after the baptism, there was some kind of connection, more recognition in his eyes. But there was also fear. I hugged him and made the sign of the cross on his forehead one last, wanting to beg God not to let this happen, wanting desperately to be able to offer him life as we know it, the health and wholeness we yearn for as people of the Incarnation. But as the famous prayer I draw from often reminds me: we are ministers, not messiahs.  I had done what I was able to do.

Rufino heads home to Chiapas on Friday. I will pray for him and pray for a world where a young man does not have to die so young.  If you are so inclined, hold him close in your heart.

I am trying to remember you
&
Let you go
At
The same time
Nayyirah Waheed

Three years ago, these were the last, somewhat frantic, days of our life in Fort Lauderdale. The movers would be at the house on the 17^th and 18^th. On the 19^th as dawn was breaking, we’d head out, Sherod in his truck, I in my car, with Boo and Spot and Daisy along for the ride. On this date, that year, Maria was on the eve of heading to her new home in Tallahassee.

It is increasingly peculiar, this business of looking back. The dates are so clearly registered in the muscle and sinew and bone of my very body it seems, so I cannot but stop and pay attention. What was once so vivid there was no way I would ever forget a single detail now grows more blurry, while still so present. I was driving home not long ago and out of nowhere, realized my mind was carefully crafting the definitive answer I wished I could give to one of the serious, innuendo-laden concerns raised about the New River Regional Ministry, especially on the St Ambrose campus. I walked myself back from the edge of self-righteous rage. I reminded myself life had gone on. I listened to myself breathe.

We are called to live fruitful lives and these past few days have been filled with reminders that what fruit we bear, we bear where we are. I picked three San Marzano tomatoes and an eggplant last evening, then found another eggplant the Spouseman had forgotten on a bench close to the vegetable garden. The first blackberry of our new blackberry vine was ripe for the picking as well. It looked so good, I ate it as soon as I took this picture, sweet and delicious and the essence of summer.

These next few weeks will find us scrambling to put up, can and freeze such abundance.

Yesterday, during the Bible Study I facilitate weekly, we had a marvelous conversation about call and commission—how apostolic succession is in tension with a Spirit-filled commission that comes from an unexpected place. We are working on the 9^th chapter of Acts, and looking at Ananias, who was not an apostle yet issued the prophetic call to Saul. That lead to a discussion of the ordination of Bishop Seabury and the ordination of the Philadelphia 11 and in the conversation, our connection to every bit of the story of God’s work in creation told in the Bible was real and energizing.

Waheed’s brief and eloquent verses give me a sense of my life in these still early days of summer, when the harvest has begun and winter and desolation are still within sight, even as they grow dimmer in memory. Still. Life.

This year I have to be a little extra creative to make sure I get in my continuing ed time  before September 1st, when I start on my third year of employment at Ascension. I finally settled on a reading and writing project. On Thursdays for the next 9 or so weeks, I am going to work on a self-study project. I will pick back up on the writing I started last year with Collegeville and have made less progress on than I coulda, shoulda woulda. I am grateful that there is a fine editor in town who I look forward to working with.

I am also adding another layer to my project. Way back in my days as a seminarian, I did a really cool independent study course with a woman called Sue Armentrout, where we had a semester-long discussion about a book by a French philosopher called Paul Ricouer. He had just published the first part of the first volume of a set called Time and Narrative. It was a wonderful discussion and I have wanted to go back to his work for a long time now; I went on a tad of a shopping spree last week. I have no idea if his work will in any way inform my writing, or if in fact, it will be the reverse (though I am not holding my breath that I have anything at all to engage with Ricouer). I should probably count myself lucky if I manage to work my way through the three volumes of Time and Narrative.  It is so well worth the effort, though…

To make this even more official (and in a perverse sorta way, thrilling), I have procured a carrel in an out-of-the-way corner of the library of the Supreme Court of Alabama thanks to the generosity of their librarian, Mr. Tim Lewis, Esq. At least in the morning, but probably for most of my Thursdays, I will be squirreled away doing my readin’n writin’. Totally cool.

Then, this evening I saw something that was truly the icing on the cake or the exclamation point on a particularly well crafted sentence. An online friend, Katherine,  linked an article about Macron and Ricouer. You can read it here. So, in a friend of a friend, existential kind of way, it’s like I get to hang out with Macron as well. Not shabby company. Sweeeeeet!

She was beautiful. Her eyes could dance with such mischief and merriment. She loved pretty shoes, especially Ferragamos. When I close my eyes I can still hear her comforting me during those hard times at Children’s in Boston: “ya, ya Rosita”.

On a Sunday night like tonight, it was June 5, 2011, my mom died.  I continue to miss her beyond words.

Mom (on the right) 

My parents, probably at one of the Consular Christmas Parties in Cali