An open letter on the proposed budget

Posted on March 20, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A letter to my congressional representatives. Please note that this is my personal opinion, and not sent on behalf of any congregation or organization. 

My fellow Americans,

I would like to take a moment of your time to consider the inhuman budget proposal put before our government last week.

Allow me to explain such a stark characterization of its content:

We humans came into being as a product of our environment. We live on a planet with the ideal “Goldilocks” conditions for life. Well-tended and cared for, this earth provides everything that we have needed to survive and thrive. But it is vulnerable to abuse and poison. We owe it to our very humanity to nurture its health, even if only for the sake of our own.

Speaking of health, we humans have developed phenomenal knowledge and artfulness in the practice of healing. We have eradicated some plagues that struck terror into our ancestors. We have pioneered tiny techniques that have saved small lives barely begun, and extended our families’ time together.

It is a mark of our humanity that we have the capacity for empathy, which drives us to seek to ease the suffering and hurt of those whom we see around us. It is that empathy that moves us to feed a hungry child, knowing that the distraction of that gnawing void will keep her otherwise from growing in stature and in knowledge. It is compassion that organizes the delivery of company and a warm meal to an elderly widower.

We communicate not only by means of compassion. We have an almost supernatural and celebrated ability to commune quite universally, through the means of art and music, drama and dance. Surely, we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139:14)

And we know our history. These United States are a human construct. If we sell our humanity, then we lose it all, and no wall can keep it in, and no army can win it back. “For what will it profit them,” asked one great leader, “if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?” (Matthew 16:26a)

And the same wise one said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 7:21)

In all humility and humanity, I recommend, and as my representatives dare I say that I require, that you reject this budget where it falls short in its humanity; for that is a deficit we simply cannot afford.

Respectfully,

The Reverend Rosalind C Hughes

************************************************

Annotated version, for the biblically inclined:

We humans came into being as a product of our environment. We live on a planet with the ideal “Goldilocks” conditions for life. Well-tended and cared for, this earth provides everything that we have needed to survive and thrive. But it is vulnerable to abuse and poison. We owe it to our very humanity to nurture its health, even if only for the sake of our own.

In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens … then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food … The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. (Genesis 2:4b,7-9a,15)

Speaking of health, we humans have developed phenomenal knowledge and artfulness in the practice of healing. We have eradicated some plagues that struck terror into our ancestors. We have pioneered tiny techniques that have saved small lives barely begun, and extended our families’ time together.

For he does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men. (Lamentations 3:33)

It is a mark of our humanity that we have the capacity for empathy, which drives us to seek to ease the suffering and hurt of those whom we see around us. It is that empathy that moves us to feed a hungry child, knowing that the distraction of that gnawing void will keep her otherwise from growing in stature and in knowledge. It is compassion that organizes the delivery of company and a warm meal to an elderly widower.

But [Jesus] answered them, “You give them something to eat.” (Mark 6:37a)

Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty ad give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?” And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:37-40)

We communicate not only by means of compassion. We humans have an almost supernatural and celebrated ability to commune quite universally, through the means of art and music, drama and dance. Surely, we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139:14)

And whenever the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand; so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him. (1 Samuel 16:23)

And we know our history. These United States are a human construct. If we sell our humanity, then we lose it all, and no wall can keep it in, and no army can win it back. “For what will it profit them,” asked one great leader, “if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?” (Matthew 16:26a)

And the same wise one said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 7:21)

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Forgiving Jesus

Posted on March 19, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

The readings for the third Sunday in Lent include Jesus’ encounter with a Samaritan woman at a well, and Moses’ miraculous striking water from stone.

In the old stories, this encounter beside a well would have ended in marriage. Jacob’s father met his mother beside a well, and he met his beloved Rachel there a generation later. The land on which Jesus and the woman meet was Jacob’s bequest to the sons of his son, Joseph; the firstborn of Rachel, his beloved. There is history, in the ancestral traditions that Jesus and the woman share, of promising strangers meeting women beside the well.

But between Jacob’s time and theirs, another history has intervened. Divided by the exile into Babylon, which left behind the people of the northern kingdom, the people of Samaria pursue their religion differently than do the Jews, and a mutual mistrust has grown into outright enmity, even despite their promising beginnings as children of Abraham, children of the living God together.

There is no huge leap needed to find the parallels between their situation and the mistrust, even the rhetoric of enmity, that divides the children of Abraham, the children of the God of Abraham, from one another. We have seen the horrors to which anti-Semitism can lead; we are rightly wary of our own Islamophobia. We come to the well confused by our shared history of faith and violence, forgiveness and suspicion. We come to the well, wary of one another, and through our veil of protection do we recognize Jesus, when he asks us for a cup of water?

The tension, then, that makes this such a great story in our canon of Jesus is not only the tension between a man and a woman, met as strangers, alone and exposed outside the town. It is not only the tension of history, the ongoing struggle for justification between Jew and Samaritan. The tension that brings this story to life is the struggle between love and enmity, between life and its memory of cruel death, between our good and proper human aspirations to right religious observance and the divine grace of God.

In the old stories, this encounter beside a well should have ended in marriage, or perhaps, alternatively, in war.

I had my own encounter once with God beside a well. I hesitate to tell you all of the details, in case you think me a crazy woman; I have a hunch that my Samaritan ancestor-sister can relate. Anyway, it was noonday, and the well was in the Lake District of north-western England, the country where Beatrix Potter wrote her Peter Rabbit stories and William Wordsworth met his crowd of daffodils. I had just come into the knowledge that I was pregnant for the second time. We never got to meet the first; and that was the tension that thickened the air above the well that noonday. I was grateful, so grateful for this second chance at a new life; and I was bitter, and frightened, and angry that the first had left me bereft.

I found God beside the well, and I had a choice, whether to meet God as a friend, and to bless God joyfully; or whether to turn away, curse God, and follow my own heart back into its hard shell of protectionism, mistrust, and enmity.

Met beside the well, the Samaritan woman and I laughed, without much humour, at the outrageous, flirtatious offers of Jesus. Living water, ever-flowing, clean and refreshing blessings, life without dessication or decay? We knew that this was not the way that the world works; and we wondered whether we were being taken for fools by a sly and manipulative conman. Jew and Samaritan, mortal and immortal; what do we share in common with one another, after all?

We have more in common with the people of Flint, Michigan; one poor public works decision away from disease and ruin. They, in turn, might rally to the cry of the people cursing Moses in the wilderness:

“Did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”

Of course, that story ended in a miracle. But I noticed something, reading these tales of living water side by side. In each of them, God does not act alone, but invites the people who would test God, who would question Jesus, who are wary of trusting in God’s grace; God invites even those people to participate themselves in the God’s acts of saving mercy.

The water does not break open by itself, or at the touch of an angel, but only through the medium of Moses. Jesus, coming to the well, first asks the woman, “Will you give me a cup of water?”

It is as though God is doing everything in God’s power to bridge the gulf between our trouble and our expectation, between our history and our hope.

And it turns out that, after all, we share a history with God. We share a history steeped in God’s perennial practice of mercy, love, rescue and redemption. It turned out, too, that day beside the well, that God even shared a history of parental loss, seeing a son suffer on the cross, the very heart of heaven broken by the weight of grief and glory.

The woman ended up trusting Jesus, forgiving him for his place in her family history, because the well of their shared ancestry ran far deeper than their divisions, and their faith in the one God, differing religious practice notwithstanding, was far more likely, in the end, to unite than to divide them.

As she was reconciled to Jesus, an unprecedented accord between Jews and Samaritans ended up with Jesus and his disciples staying for days in the house of their enemies, without fear, without judgement, prejudice, or enmity. In the Samarian wilderness, in the heat of the noonday, a little oasis of the kingdom of God sprouted up in the city of Sychar, rooted in the spirit and in truth.

She would still, after he had moved on towards Jerusalem, need to return to the well to draw water day by day, and to negotiate the complexities of life in a region riddled with strife. Still, there would be days when the water was undrinkable and the children sick, even dying. Still, in the wilderness of Sin, the people gathered around Moses had a long way to go before they could rest their weary complaints and their frightened hearts.

And yet something was born anew that day, some hope, some second chance at new life.

Forgiving Moses, in a rush of generosity lubricated by water from the rock, the Israelites for a moment also forgot to be angry at God. Forgiving Jesus his enemy heritage, the woman found herself open to astonishing new possibilities: could this be the Messiah? She became one of the first to recognize him. Reconciled to God; dare I say, forgiving God? we are opened to deeper possibilities of a partnership with grace, a more profound understanding of the history that we share:

the history that we share with one another, as children of Abraham, as children of the baked earth, intertwined by birth and blood, death and the stories that we tell of those who have gone before us;

the history that we share not only with Moses, and with the woman at the well, and with Jesus; but the history that God has shared with us;

a living stream of grace and mercy whose current runs through to this day.

Forgiving Jesus his history, the woman became one of the first to recognize him as her redeemer. Forgiving God my history, I was able to strike living water even from the bitter well of grief.

In the ancient stories, such an encounter would end with a marriage: the promise of forever, the ever faithful covenant of God.

Amen.

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Well

Posted on March 16, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

I do not think
I would invite anyone
to come and meet a man
who told aloud every
thing I’d ever done.

I might, instead,
invite him to lean
deep over the well;
inviting an accident; surely not
one more thing to tell.

This is how you make it
hard for me to linger
long under the noonday
haze; shivering heat
of your penetrating gaze.

Love is a low blow.
Lean in, you say, see,
deep underground living waters flow,
and I fall;
you have brought me low.

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In time

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

On the way home, an interesting radio piece about time, and our over-scheduled lives. Our relationship with time, the professor indicated, has become too rigid and unforgiving, less enjoyable than it might be, given more flexibility and forgiveness.

I had to smile, because I had just come from a centering prayer meeting, a regularly scheduled time out of time. We had read, as our introduction to our prayer time, from the Preface to Richard Holloway’s A New Heaven, notably this:

Particularly do we want all the moments that transfigure time to continue, to stay their onward rush. It is Time, then, that we wish to be redeemed from; but all our schemes for self-redemption are themselves caught on the wheel of time … That strange, tattered glory, the Christian Church, claims that there is a redemption from the rat-trap of time and successiveness and tragedy. It claims that there is a meaning which enfolds it, but it can only be spoken in riddles and parables and whispered poetry of bread that lives and endures for ever.

Time is my brother,
a fellow creature,
one of the first; for without time
can even God make a beginning?

Time is a bully, relentless,
unconstrained by mercy,
unchained by compassion,
with no respect for rank,

or reason. Jesus said,
Love your enemies, pray
for those who persecute you.
Is there a blessing for time?

There is. It comes
on the heels of one who
fasted in the wilderness
the long days.

It flows through the hours
of sunset, pouring wine
in the garden.

It comes with the slowness of death,
the cold pause of the tomb.

It rises with first light,
creation reborn;
without time, could even
God make such a beginning?

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Fear of falling 

Posted on March 5, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

The lectionary lessons for today are about Adam and Eve, the fall, temptation, redemption, resistance …

The devil dared him to be fearless.
The devil dared him to be brazen,
in God’s face;
a son so independent in his own mind,
he would forget who taught him
to fear gravity,
to respect the rules that govern
cause and effect,
who set the spheres in motion.
Do not be afraid, he said;
but his trembling, twitching tail
belied his own fear of falling.

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Hope in the ashes

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

There is hope in cold ashes.

We do not “do” Lent, we do not approach the fast as those who have no hope, or as though who fear the fire. For God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. God will remember God’s people, recollect the promises shown to them in the incarnation of the Christ.

There are enough reality shows around these days for all of us to know that, for the survivalist, to awaken and find that the fire has gone out and the ashes are cold strikes fear into the heart. But we are not survivalists. We are mortal, and we owe our lives not to our own skill and cunning but to our Creator, our Redeemer, our God.

Many of us grew up in a religious tradition where guilt was venerated to the point that we were encouraged to make more of it, to supplement those powerful feelings with manufactured dismay; but Jesus encourages us not to make a display of guilt, nor a show of shame. Guilt, we notice, is strangely close to pride: those who parade their penitence really want to show off their own survivalist skills in the most spiritual way possible.
Sometimes we cling so hard to our sin, to our shame and to our burning guilt, as though that is what makes us whole. We define ourselves, even our faithfulness, by the temperature of our guilt, running hot, as though feverish penitence alone could save us. That is when the cold, gritty ashes strike fear into our hearts.

But it is not, after all, our own guilt, or our shame, nor even our penitence that saves us from the fire. It is God. It is only in God that sin is transformed into sorrow, into regret, repentance, renewal. It is only in God that death is transformed into life. It is only in Christ that the cool ashes of the morning are recollected, not so as to return them to the fire, but that they may be refashioned into something new.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of William Wordsworth. Maybe it’s the early advent of the daffodils. I have been remembering his musings about poetry: he has said,

that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

I think of the tranquillity of the ashes, cool and collected after the flooding fire. There is hope in the ashes.

There is hope in the ashes. Gone is the guilt and the burning shame; nothing is left of the passions that fuelled the fire and fanned its flames. Recollected in tranquillity, in the promise that greets repentance – the promise of new life, second chances, reconciliation; recollected in tranquillity, our sin no longer has the power to burn us up.

These ashes, these symbols of our mortality, these mortal remains of creation are symbols, too, of God’s life working within us.

In the beginning, when the human was made out of the dust of the earth, God’s breath stirred its dusty origins into life, and the human was transformed into something new, and something intimately connected to the life of God.

In his Incarnation, Jesus rekindled this connection. Living dust, he moved among us, he burned with passion, he cooled his body in the tomb. And in the cold light of the early morning, he recollected himself anew, and we have seen his resurrection.

Ashes are not afraid of the fire. They have nothing left to fear from fire. There is hope in the ashes, in their spent energy, their burned-out passion. Reduced to their essence, they know that there is one hope for new life, and it does not consist of going back into the flames. Instead, the ashes find new life dug into the earth, feeding the bulbs and the soil, producing crowds of daffodils. They find new life by feeding new life in those other creatures of the same God.

Deeds of loving kindness, of mercy, of justice, to feed the world with goodness; this is a Lenten fast fit for the ashes.

I invite you to a holy Lent. I invite you to a season in which, cool and collected, we are able to face the ashes of our broken lives. We can sift through their debris without fear of getting burned. And we can get ready for something new; some new thing which God longs to lead us into.

I invite you to a Lenten fast which looks forward to a new day, new life with the resurrected Christ.

Amen.

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Forty days of fear

Posted on February 27, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

The most ubiquitous instruction in the Bible, we are told, is this: Do not be afraid.
And yet, its counterpart is not unfamiliar, either: Fear the Lord your God.

Ash Wednesday marks the first of forty days of Lent. It also marks the end of the first forty days of a new presidency that has engaged the emotions and spiritual lives of people within and without this country like perhaps no other.

During these past forty days in this country, we have tended to stoke our own fears and one another’s. The President has told us to fear bad guys, bad actors, bad hombres; to fear liberal activists, public bathrooms, so-called judges; to trust (almost) no one. On the other side of the political divide, we are advised to fear the President, his cabinet, climate change, corporate greed, and our own tendencies to division over diversity. Many caught in the middle already know all too well whom to fear: Jewish Community Centers are learning to dread the new Monday ritual of bomb threats called in around the country; those who have long fought for equal dignity under the law and in their local establishments wearily take up a defensive stance once more – they know the drill.

Where, in fact, does the instruction not to be afraid fall short in the face of terror attacks on our news feeds, and the uncertainty of our future together? Then again, where does the commandment to fear God, and keep God’s commandments to love our neighbours galvanize resistance to our scapegoating of one another, and a determination to persist in love in the face of any such fears?

I am dedicating my Lenten practice this year to Forty Days of Fear, not because I need extra excuses for fear in my life, but because I have a hunch that properly discerned fear might the corollary, not the opposite of that ubiquitous instruction, Do not be afraid: Fear not/fear God.

Fear the Lord and keep God’s commandments; to love God and to love your neighbour as yourself. For perfect love drives out fear, and so the fear of God, properly and paradoxically practised, might be the end of fear itself.

“Fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom;” sagacity sprinkled like salt throughout scripture.

Do not be afraid.

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Penitence

Posted on February 24, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

After William Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 1800

Recollected in tranquillity,
passions burnt beyond their embers.
Unguarded breath conjures dust devils,
smoke without fire,
echoes of disgrace remembered
by the ashen light of dawn.
Dignified in variegated gray,
sifted, judiciously, of all meannness
and vulgarity,
they grace an untroubled brow.

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The sun also rises

Posted on February 19, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

During the recent inauguration, just last month, Franklin Graham stepped up to pray for the new president. He introduced his prayer by noting that rain had begun to fall just as the president had begun his speech to the nation. “Rain,” declared Graham, “is a sign of God’s blessing.” It appears that the new president was not too keen on that particular biblical interpretation of the signs of the sky, because he has since declared that as he began to speak, although it looked as though it might rain, it held off at God’s command, and in fact, the sun came out. That, he gave his opinion, was actually the sign of God’s blessing.

We may never know what the weather was really doing on that day in January. What we do know is that both men, preacher and politician, missed this line in Jesus’ sermon on  the mount, where he confirms what we already knew in our hearts, though we so often wish it were otherwise:  we know that the rain falls of the righteous and on the unrighteous, and that the sun rises not to single out those of God’s favour, but on the good and the evil alike.

Our blessings, God’s bounty and mercy are not, it seems, to be fenced in or parcelled out according to our ideas of merit.

If it were not so; if God granted individual climatic chambers to each of us based on our justification, then we would be locked into separate worlds. As it is, we are all in this life together, with our neighbours; even with our enemies.

The sun rises on the Roman soldier, and on his Jewish conscript, Simon of Cyrene, compelled to carry the cross of a convict for a mile outside the city. The rain falls on the fields of neighbours locked in a bitter legal dispute, suing the shirts off one another’s backs, while their crops grow side by side, and the birds and insects, free from such enmity, cross-pollinate their produce.

Once again, Jesus is still preaching his great Sermon on the Mount, and this week’s gospel selection continues from last week’s teaching about the law, which Jesus has come to fulfill. It is that law that we read in our first lesson, from Leviticus, which outlaws untruth, which demands an ethic of common justice devoid of economic influence. It is a law which pays the worker her due, and without delay, and which insists on feeding also the alien, the indigent, the unfortunate, for the sun also rises on them, and the same rain may fall on us. It is a law which spells out the prohibition of placing obstacles in the way of those already handicapped by their circumstances in life. It is a law made perfect in the dual commandment to love God, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself.

And, as is becoming his habit, Jesus, in his exposition of this law to his disciples and to the crowds that surround them, goes one huge step further. Already, we know from Leviticus that our neighbour extends beyond the people we know. We are to care even for the alien, and the anonymous poor. So you have heard it said, says Jesus, and now I tell you, love even your enemies.

Love your enemies.

The love which Jesus describes is not a warm, fuzzy feeling towards those with whom we disagree.

It is a practical, active, defiant love which insists on doing right, right in the face of those doing wrong. It challenges abuses of the law by its stubborn and stoic resistance. I have this movie in my mind, rightly or wrongly, of the Jewish conscript forced to carry the burdens of a Roman soldier for a mile. Reaching the marker, the conscript says, now, this second mile is for me, and as I have heard your command to me, you will now hear the commandments of my God. And for a second mile, for just twenty minutes or so, the conscript becomes the conduit, God’s chosen people the messengers of God’s love to the world, reaching even into the conscience of a Roman imperial regiment.

Or maybe the man says, “Tell me about yourself. Tell me about the land you have left behind,” and perhaps they part, not as friends, but as fellow humans at least, locked in this journey together, under the same sun.

Love leads by example. A friend of mine, an Episcopal priest in a town on the north eastern coast, returned from vacation this week to find that someone had spray painted a swastika onto his car. “Blessed are you [my friend], when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matt.5:11-12)

Rejoice, and be glad. Love even your enemies. Because love leads by example; and because he is a good man, and a fine priest, even so warned, this man will show up this morning at his parish and he will persist in proclaiming this gospel, this gospel that insists that no one is excluded from the love of God, and he will celebrate the sacraments of the love of God revealed in Christ Jesus; because this is how evil is overcome.

It is overcome by persistent justice, unflinching mercy, unrelenting righteousness. It is overcome by fierce, determined, deliberate love.

The love that Jesus describes is unflinching, unafraid, and it is relentless. Rebuked and reviled, love nevertheless persists. It refuses to be overcome. It will not give way to injustice. It turns the other cheek.

When Jesus was killed, and when he rose again, and presented his face to the Roman soldiers stationed outside of his tomb, they fainted away (Matt. 28:4). They fainted away at the sight of such love.

This love is not soft, or small. It is as old as creation. It is stronger than death. It reaches into every aspect of our lives, even those we thought were hidden in the tombs of our hearts. It roots out enmity. It rises on the good and on the evil, and love alone can tell them apart.

So go, be holy, for your God has made you holy. Go, be perfect, as Jesus has commanded. Tell the truth. Persist in doing justice in the face of chaos. Insist on mercy instead of instilling enmity.  Know that love wins, that the love of God has already shaped this world, and continues to bend it towards God’s kingdom with every small act of love that endures, each day that the sun rises.

Walk in love, as Christ loved us, and gave himself for us of that love, perfect and holy. (Eph. 5:2)

Amen.

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For the love of libraries

Posted on February 16, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Yesterday was the commemoration of Thomas Bray, who founded scores of lending libraries and founded the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Promulgation of the Gospel. The gospel reading appointed for his festival is Luke 10:1-9, the sending of the seventy(-two). I was invited to preach at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral’s Evensong.

When I was a child, the public library was a place of great power and influence in my life. It was a place of discovery and of purely voluntary adventures into knowledge; where curiosity was encouraged and questions were not considered talking back. It was a place where a child received recommendations without coercion, and direction without correction. It was a place where the choices, decisions, predilections even of a child were respected and accepted. It was a secret hotbed, a nursery, a hothouse for independence and agency, for a child’s dignity.

The library was my weekly ritual, my Saturday morning church before I ever stumbled across the Sunday morning sacrament. I wonder whether, without that grounding, I would have found my way as a child alone into the church, or had the courage to cross its imposing threshold, had I not been encouraged, admitted, and welcomed as a child with her own agenda and will into the great cathedral of learning that was the children’s room in the basement of the Penarth Public Library.

One of the gifts of this Evensong service is the opportunity to explore the examples of the holy women and holy men who went before us as pioneers and pilgrims of the faith. It’s like being back in the basement of the public library, where I read every biography of every classical composer on the shelves. Now I get to pick up and read people like Thomas Bray, whose bookish activism earned him accolades as a father of the modern public lending library.

It is apparent, from Bray’s own writings, that he recognized that democratic levelling of libraries that affected my childhood, since he said,

This is certain, that Knowledge does more to distinguish the Possessors of it, than Titles, Riches, or great Places;

so that his plans to extend the network of libraries in the colonies under his care beyond private collections to publicly useful lending libraries were intended to extend the learning and the status of persons beyond those who might normally be expected to afford a library: the landed and the gentry. His provision for his English countrymen in the colonies did not, either, limit his vision for the education and instruction in the gospel of their slaves, and of the Native Americans on whose lands they made their plantations.

Still, Bray was not himself a librarian, but a priest, and his devotion to learning began and was founded in the gospel. He argued not only for providing books to Maryland and the other areas of the country that he found to be in need, but also pastors, priests, and missionaries. He considered it incredible, for example, that Newfoundland had been abandoned by the church, writing,

Can any one believe it, when he is told, that … so little Care has been taken, with respect to such a Colony, that there never was, nor yet is, any Preaching, Prayers, or Sacraments, or any Ministerial and Divine Offices, performed on the Island; but that they should be suffered to live as those, who know no God in the World!

Thomas Bray, the Doctor of Divinity, was not content with the Saturday rituals of the library; he wanted the Sunday sacrament to be provided to all who might have need of it. No one, he felt, should need to live “as those, who know no God in the World.”

He must have suffered his fair share of colonial myopia. Missionary zeal is not in itself a bad thing; but it has tended, over the centuries, to be misapplied in many cases.

Still, the Christian missionary movement itself might be said to have started with Jesus himself, sending his disciples out ahead of him to the places where he intended to follow. It was this vision that inspired Thomas Bray: that his clergymen would be wise and helpful guides to their American flocks; and that they would assure the people that the kingdom of God is near; that Jesus is coming, and already is not far away.

The disciples are told to travel light; to hold themselves accountable not to their own baggage, but to the people whom they encounter, and visit, and serve. They are encouraged to receive as well as to give, and to live in peace with all, as far as they are able. They are to get to know the people to whom Jesus is coming, in their own homes, in the midst of their everyday lives. They are to breathe their air, eat their food, share in the risks and rewards of living on their land. They are not to hold themselves apart.

They are not to hold themselves apart.

It was said of Thomas Bray, that he was, “a striking instance of what a man can effect, without any extraordinary genius and without any special influence;” which is a description that might be applied also to any one of those disciples of Jesus, the twelve, the seventy, those of us gathered today, with appropriate apologies to the extraordinary geniuses in the congregation.

To be Christ’s emissaries in the world, to go where Christ intends to follow, we are called not to be exceptional, nor to hold ourselves apart, but to occupy those very public spaces where all may meet on level ground; and to place ourselves at the service of those we find there. We are to greet with peace those with whom we find ourselves in line at the coffee shop. We are to share in the hunger and the reward of those who seek learning in the libraries. We are to offer our selves and our service to those we pass in the supermarket aisles, and on the sidewalks, recognizing each one as sacred, a child of God, created with dignity, and agency, and love.

We do not reserve our reverence for one another, as fellow children imprinted upon God, only for the Sunday sacraments; but we find the gospel, we borrow and lend it to the Saturday rituals, the secular spaces, the cathedrals of our common, oh so common life.

For this is just where Jesus will come to, and is to be found: at the bottom of the basement stairs; in the imagination of a child; in the welcome of a stranger; in the unexpected grace of a greeting of peace, offered almost in passing; the touch of the divine in the middle of an ordinary day.

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Photo: Penarth Public Library, by Jaggery [CC BY-SA 2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

Bernard C. Steiner, “Rev. Thomas Bray and his American Libraries,” in The American Historical Review, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Oct., 1896, Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association), pp. 59-75 via jstor.org

“A Memorial Representing the Present State of Religion on the Continent OF North-America”, by Thomas Bray, D.D. (London: Printed by John Brudenell, for the Author, 1701), via Project Canterbury

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