Halfway

Posted on December 30, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

This devotion for the sixth day of Christmas was first posted at the Episcopal Cafe: Speaking to the Soul

Halfway through packing for their pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Temple and its sacrifice, the covenant and its blood, Joseph is distracted by the keening of the child. He had never noticed before how like grief a baby’s cry could be – wailing for the womb, mourning the waters from which it was drawn out and adopted into the world. Half-turning, he would scoop up the infant and cradle him, soothe him from the pain to come; but his mother already has him in her arms, holding him to one breast, whispering secrets.

Halfway through the night, a shepherd shifts uneasily in sleep, dreaming of a terrifying light, a polyphony of voices, but it is only the sheep bleating. They, too, still watch the sky for the return of angels.

Halfway through their journey, the astronomers, looking for their own light, rail at the cloud cover and complain to their camels. They set up camp in the desert, closer than they think to the site of God’s deliverance.

Halfway through dinner, Herod belches and clutches his chest. Heartburn. For all the heat of its name, his blood runs cold each time he is reminded of his mortality. He is out of sorts, and he is afraid.

Halfway through a prayer, Anna pauses. She can hear Simeon greeting another young couple with his practised patter, putting them at ease with his restless eyes and excitement, as though every infant coming through these portals might be, at last, the Messiah. As she hears them murmuring by, gossiping under their breath about Simeon’s zealous optimism, for the first time in decades, Anna realizes that she is hungry.

Halfway through the prayer of confession, I stumble across the words, “We have not loved you with our whole heart.”

On the sixth day, halfway through Christmas, with the wholesomeness of God’s love lying in a manger and the heartlessness of Herod running riot in the streets; with God’s Incarnate One being prepared for his first wound, and his mother slowly healing, but her catching her heart in her mouth each time he sighs; on the sixth day, Joseph half-turns back, forgetting to pack up the bread he had picked up before the baby cried, his heart halfway to heaven and his spirit halfway to madness with the wonder of it all.

Featured image: detail from St Joseph with the Infant Jesus, Elisabetta Sirani (Bologna 1638-1665), c. 1662, photographed by Palmesco, used under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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The first breath

Posted on December 25, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

scented with humanity –

the particulates of life –

held for what seemed like

eternity, let loose at last

(his mother, astonished at

the audacity of her body, gasped)

with the force of a singular

creation, splitting the skies,

setting stars with its

raucous music

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Mary and Joseph’s no good, terrible, wonderful year

Posted on December 24, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

A homily for Christmas Eve, 2020

At the turning of the year, as the days began to push back against the pushiness of night; as the light grew longer and the shadows shorter, the people were going about their business without a second thought, as the saying goes, as in the days before the Flood. There was no warning that everything was about to change, the world turn upside down, a new creation sweep across the earth as surely as in the days of Noah.

Back in those days, in which ignorance was bliss, an ordinary young couple was planning a wedding. But their plans were abruptly upended, not only by the government decree that mandated their registration and restricted their freedom of location, sending them scurrying for accommodation. That was only the backdrop to the real dilemma: that an angel of the Lord had appeared to each of them in turn to explain that instead of marrying and settling down as they had anticipated, instead, they had been chosen to bear and raise the Son of God, and all of their other dreams would have to take a back seat, for now, to the imperative of God’s love.

In an instant, everything was changed. By late spring, their plans were in tatters and their nerves raw from explaining to relatives the new situation. Mary, visiting her cousin in the country after Elizabeth emerged from her long quarantine, found herself staying for months, unable to leave. Just when she and Joseph could have used the time together.

Through late summer and into the autumn, quickly and quietly married to avoid the gossiping crowds, the new family found themselves almost adjusting, as though, for moments at a time, this were all quite normal and to be expected. After all, it had happened to Elizabeth, too.

But as the night pressed back again, eating into their days, the sleepless dreams returned. The political situation was becoming oppressive, and it became necessary to travel south, to Bethlehem, and search for shelter.

The centres of hospitality were full. They had to make a makeshift bedroom and delivery suite out of a cave, where the animals were stalled. It was nothing like Mary had imagined her marriage, her first childbirth, would be, this strange isolation with the ox and the ass. It was a singular situation, in a stressed-out time and place, and it was there and then that the Christ was born, God incarnate, Emmanuel: Jesus, whose name means our salvation.

It was a year like no other, but Jesus didn’t wait for a better time to come among us. He didn’t choose a safer place to be born – the palace of the king, or the living quarters of the chief priests, or some other realm altogether.

Instead he entered into the messiness of the stable, the precariousness of a politically explosive empire, the inexperience and uncertainty of young lives, the isolation of those without a footprint on the earth. He was born into a makeshift hospital when all of the others were full, and he made do with the midwives his mother and father could muster, drafted out of shepherds and angels and strangers.

He did not wait for a better time.

The world turns and we find ourselves once more at the manger. Last time the nights were this short, and the days just beginning to push back against their borders, we had no idea what the year would bring. It has upended our expectations, more than once. It has brought us grief, and loneliness, and creativity, and comfort. It has certainly not been without conflict, doubt, or fear. Yet still it brings us here, to the manger, once more.

Jesus didn’t wait for a better time to be born among us, because God knows we need him now. Jesus would not leave us hanging when we are out of room in the hospitals and out of patience with our politics and out of sorts with each other because we just need a hug.

God chose exactly the most inconvenient, unpromising, unstable time to be born among us, because that’s when we need Jesus the most.

Mary pondered this in her heart, as she contemplated the child lying in a manger, and all that was before them. There would be trials to come; life would never be the same as it was. And yet here, in the messiness and unexpected warmth of it all: here was Love laid out before her; the love of God, made manifest, born to save us all.

Amen.

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Solstice

Posted on December 21, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

This poem first appeared at Bearings Online, a publication of the Collegeville Institute, at last year’s winter solstice

Solstice

At the abyss of the year
the sun is silent;
but in the bleak midwinter
something shifts
A fearful hope, homunculus,
wakes the woman: light
beyond the turning of the world
begins to show

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Complicity with God

Posted on December 20, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio

The fourth Sunday of Advent is one of my favourites of the church year. The apocalyptic visions and prophetic warnings have given way to the promise that Christmas is, indeed, coming; that Christ will be born in Bethlehem, the manger filled; that the angels will sing and for a moment, we will forget the present, the future, the apocalypse, everything except that baby, born in more than the image of God: Emmanuel. God with us.

On this Sunday we still have the anticipation, the anxious and fervent hope. There is labour to come, we know that. But in this moment, we allow ourselves the hope of complicity with God: Let it be as you have promised.

And with Mary we break out into the song of all that might be: the redemption of the lowly, the revolution of the meek; an end to corruption and conceit; the satisfaction of hunger and the setting right of the world.

We sang a different form of the Magnificat this morning, prompted at first, admittedly, by purely pragmatic concerns over copyright of the hymns we usually use; but when I came to research the tune we adopted, Jerusalem, I discovered some things about its composer that seemed almost prophetic in their appropriateness for this morning’s worship.

You may know that Charles Hubert Hastings Parry composed this music to accompany a poem by William Blake, based on an old legend that Joseph of Arimathea once took the young Jesus on a European tour (the whole thing being under the Roman Empire, who would not permit a Brexit, and therefore full of open borders). Uncle Joseph was supposed to have landed with the teenaged Messiah on the western tip of England. But Blake’s poem may also have been a critique of the rise of the industrial era, which he feared was crushing the poor, not to mention destroying green and pleasant land, and of the complicity of the established church in that secular oppression and support of rich and powerful interests over the needs and cares of the lowly.

When Parry first composed his tune, he was commissioned by those encouraging support of the war effort and the troops of the First World War. But Parry found himself sickening of war and withdrawing his support from the pro-war movement. It is appropriate, then, that his tune in our Hymnal is set to the peaceable words of Isaiah, in which the lion lies down with the lamb.

But Parry did lend his composition to a different fight. When he was approached by the Women’s Suffrage movement, he gladly gave them permission to use the song as their anthem. Like Mary, he recognized that God did not regard the estate of women in as low terms as some of the men around them; he was happy to affirm their claims to full and equal stature, to level out the elevated and raise up the lowly. He even, upon his death, bequeathed to them the copyright of the anthem.

Parry did not live to see the completion of women’s suffrage in his home country. He died a victim of the global pandemic, the Spanish flu, six weeks before the first, limited allowances for women’s votes, and a month before the Armistice that ended the First World War.

Parry, an ally of peace, encourager of revolutionary equality, a victim of pandemic, and a life lived in anticipation whose echoes resound still in song is, I think, the perfect accompaniment to this morning’s Magnificat.

We are still finding our way between the fight for what is right and the deep and urgent desire for peace. We are still reckoning with the fallout and pollution of our own creative success. We are still uncomfortably aware of our inequity. We are still connected globally as much by our suffering as by our progress; but we are learning, and we are not without hope. We are still labouring toward the kingdom of God and the upheaval of mountains and valleys that will bring equality to our lives and justice to our streets, an end to oppression and complicity with greed instead of with God. The contractions are strong.

This is the Sunday of anticipation of the Incarnation of God. It is the Sunday on which we sing of what might be, and consider how we will labour toward what should be, and trust that God will bring to bear what will be.

It is the Sunday on which we pledge our complicity with the conspiracy about to be born in Bethlehem: Let it be to us, O God, according to your Word.

Amen

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Christmas is coming

Posted on December 15, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

“I’m coming!” I would lie to my mother, laying in bed, or loitering over a page like a fly in treacle.

“So’s Christmas!” she would yell back, her point being that I was as slow and full of secrets as an Advent calendar, doling out its little pieces of time and chocolate with precision and restraint. If you skipped a window, finding it too late, it would be as though time turned backward, counting down instead of ratcheting up the days until the tension was perilous.

“Christmas is coming” meant that somebody was running out of patience, out of breath like a woman in labour; like a baby in the birth canal, out of options to retreat; as though, if one didn’t pay attention to the tone of a mother’s exasperation, pregnant and impending, one day it would be too late.

All the more reason, perhaps, to lie a moment longer, pausing over a paragraph, cocking an ear to listen for the exact moment when Christmas will come, all heaven break loose with the implosion of glory, the sudden and dangerous contraction of love.

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Among you

Posted on December 13, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio

Advent is a season of anticipation; of awaiting the long-expected unexpected. We sing of the second coming of Christ, with clouds and great glory. We read warnings to stay awake, to be alert to the coming of the kingdom. On the earthly and mundane scale, we wait for Christmas, to celebrate the Incarnation, the cataclasm of time and eternity born in the body of a baby; while here and now we wait for Christmas, our souls and our spirits wonder when we will see God for ourselves.

John the Baptizer had a word for the priests and the Levites about that. John the Evangelist takes pains to make sure that we know that John the Baptizer was not claiming any kind of status for himself; he pointed instead to the one who was coming after him. But there is a line that we sometimes miss while we are looking for what comes next:

“Among you stands one whom you do not know.”

That is, the one who is to come is already here.

Richard Benson, the founder of the Cowley Fathers, wrote that the saints are bound together in the

“joy of perfect sympathy since all are pouring forth their whole being to the One who is the center of their conceptions and the common principle of their life. They turn not aside from God to speak to one another; their whole being is rapt in the thought of God, and they live in the knowledge of the mutual love which binds them all because that love binds each to God. …
“Eternity is the manifestation of the marvelous unification of life.”[i]

When we recognize Christ among us, in the friend or the stranger, in the one most in need of our service and our devotion; when we seek and serve Christ in one another, then we have no need to turn away from Christ in order to serve that one, or to love them, but we love Christ in them.

When we share in the anointing that Jesus himself proclaimed from the synagogue at Capernaum, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, when we “bring good news to the oppressed, …bind up the brokenhearted, … proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners;” and do not, by any means, kill them, but show them instead the way of life; when we offer “the oil of gladness” to those who mourn, then we find among us the one who is to come, who is already here.

When we visit the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the lonely, the ones who are already here, Christ has told us, we do it also to the one who is to come.

When we love Christ in one another, then we see the one to come in the one who is already here; then we glimpse eternity in the “marvelous unification,” the solidarity of a shared life.

“Among you stands one whom you do not know,” said John, and if you knew, if you were to turn and recognize the Christ among you, the anointed one, then the Holy Spirit would be unleashed upon you in that cataclasm of time and eternity and you would have no need to turn from God to speak to one another because you would see the love of God, the spark of Divine breath, the image of God through it all.

And still, it took Jesus to be born, to be baptized, to be anointed, to be tempted, to be loved, to be crucified, to be risen, to make us know that love of God that enfolds us and unites us. It took that act of Incarnation to rupture the veil between time and eternity, and to repair the rift.

And he is coming; and “we shall see him, and our eyes behold him who is our friend, and not a stranger.” (Job 19:27)

For he is our end, and our beginning, and through his birth, that cataclasm of time and eternity, we find our way home.

[i] Richard Mieux Benson’s The Religious Vocation, is quoted in Love Came Down: Anglican Readings for Advent and Christmas, compiled by Christopher L. Webber (Morehouse Publishing, 2002), 45

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Magnificat

Posted on December 7, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

The Magnificat, Mary’s revolutionary song, is an option this Sunday and the next: Advent would not be complete without its defiant joy and radical hope.

This being a winter like no other, I thought I would do something different with this year’s Advent Magnificat. The variation offered below is designed to be sung to Hubert Hasting Parry’s magnificent Jerusalem, with apologies to the composer; although perhaps he would be sympathetic to the reassignment. Parry, after all, succumbed to the pandemic Spanish influenza in 1918, and he and his executors assigned the copyright of Jerusalem first to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, then to the Women’s Institutes, before it passed into the public domain in 1968.

Mary sings of God in the third person, and the combination of voices attempts to evoke the joining of our hymn of praise to God with Mary’s song about her very particular encounter with the Holy Spirit. The use of feminine third-person pronouns for the Divine is a quite deliberate choice. However, it would be possible to render the whole as a second-person address to God, if local circumstances compelled it.

A Magnificat

My God! My spirit sings your praise,
my soul sings out your holy Name!
My lowliness was your delight,
your blessings far beyond compare.
My spirit sings how mighty is
the Author of all life and love;
my God, my spirit sings your praise;
my soul sings out your holy Name.

Her mercy is on her children,
and her children’s children, whom
her strong arm tenders and protects;
the humble and the lowly, too.
Her wisdom undoes arrogance,
the thrones of power are dust underfoot.
My God, my spirit sings your praise;
my soul sings out your holy Name.

She feeds the hungry with good things,
sends the rich empty away.
She lifts the downcast from their grief;
she keeps the promises she’s made.
[She forgets nothing she has pledged,
her faithfulness from age to age.]
She forgets not her Israel
nor Abraham from age to age.
My God my spirit sings your praise;
my soul sings out your holy Name.

Mary’s song can be found in Luke 1:46-55.

Updated January 2022 and November 2023. In the original version of this Magnificat, I had trouble fitting the original covenant promises into the meter of the final verse. I used the example of the hymn I was using this to replace as justification and excuse for leaving them out, but it never sat right with me. This was as it should be. Mary, a Jewish woman, sang of God’s promises to Abraham, God’s covenant with Israel. In this version, I have offered both alternatives – my original and the restoration of the names of Israel and Abraham. As with the pronouns, please use the version that best suits your context and understanding.

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Comfort; comfort my people

Posted on December 6, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent. Our diocese has announced new suspensions of in-person worship through the Christmas season, as COVID cases soar locally and nationally. In the meantime, Isaiah offers comfort, John advises preparation, Peter counsels patience.

___________________________________________________________

Comfort, comfort my people, says the prophet, says our God, for they are in distress, and hope is hard to come by. Comfort them.

I spoke to several of you last week and sometimes the talk turned toward Christmas and I explained that we – that is, I, in consultation with others – had decided that we were not going to try to mimic a normal Christmas Eve in abnormal times. We could not replicate the experience of gathering in the darkening Nave as Silent Night made candles flicker and flutter with the breath of a hundred people and the star began to shine. We would not have those unguarded moments of grace, seeing someone for the first time in a year and laughing our recognition. We cannot sing O Come All Ye Faithful while telling everyone to stay home.

But comfort, comfort my people. For the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

It has spoken with the keening cry of a newborn infant and the gruff, rough voice of prophets and fishermen crying, “Prepare the way!”

When we spoke during the week, I mentioned our plans for a Living Nativity, complete with a borrowed goat, that we had yet to schedule a time for on the front lawn. After reading our Bishop’s letter on Friday, I quickly emailed the Christmas planning team and reluctantly put the kibosh on the stable. I was so looking forward to that goat. But the Bishop, in concert with his counterpart in Southern Ohio, was right to call us to account for our love of neighbour.

If we drew people together around a goat and a few costumes in order to find ourselves close to one another on Christmas Eve, even we planned to keep our distance and our masks on; if we really, secretly, hoped that the world and her dog would stop by to gaze upon the glory of the Lord on our front lawn, then we would be risking all kinds of interactions and cross-infections. I had for a moment thought that we were safe enough, but reading reports of the morbid request from the County Coroner’s office for refrigerated trucks to extend the capacity of their morgue ahead of the holiday; reading that alongside the letter from the Bishop persuaded me that we can do even more to love our neighbours this Christmas. We can stay even closer to home.

It is another cancellation, another adjustment, another twinge of grief, guilt, second-guessing, another sigh too deep for words, and I confess my part in setting us up for disappointment. But we would be so much more disappointed if we, in fact, exposed one another to serious harm.

The good news of Jesus Christ begins with a voice crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way, make straight the paths.” The straight and clear way to prepare love this Christmas is to stay at home.

But comfort, comfort my people.

We are hungry for hope, and so are the neighbours that surround us. We are weary for joy, and so are our children. Our faith is parched, and the best way to renew it is to share it. We can still comfort one another, and the others who belong to God, this Christmas, without gathering outside of good health advice.

We invite you to add to our Christmas card project by making lawn signs and large boards with a message of Christmas hope to install on our lawn. If you have seen the Christmas board that our members made for the City of Euclid display at Triangle Park, you’ll have a good idea of what I mean. Sharing inspiration, being creative, and collaborating with our community lifted the spirits of those who participated. Comfort, comfort my people, and you will find comfort for yourselves.

I do encourage you to join in the virtual diocesan choir and its carol singing. If you have not received that email or need some help, do let me know. We will use the finished carols at our service after Christmas, and it would be wonderful to see one another included.

Many of you will have received candy canes this weekend, put together and distributed by Santas United, a tribute band named after the famous St Nicolas. Consider how it made you feel, and how you might be able to reach out to someone with a card, or a phone call; something safe to bring you mutual comfort during this most unusual season. Comfort, comfort my people; it really does help us to know the love of God when we discover new ways to share that love with others across all that divides us.

As we continue to adjust and readjust our plans to celebrate the Nativity of our Lord – and there will be more details to come – we can remember the lessons of Advent: that God is not far from us; that Christ is coming, whether we are ready with our plans or not; that the patience of the Lord is our salvation. We can prepare the way by remembering the love of God that comforts us still.

Comfort, comfort my people, says the Lord.

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Advent snowfall

Posted on December 1, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

Snow: slow
relentless covering
sharp corners disguising
thin ice with deep pile
suffocating beauty: each
fractal shrugging off
the image of its neighbour

endless variations on
a theme devised before
danger delivered
into the world
under the shadow
of life

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