Sheila Andrus reports that Bishop Marc did very well with his surgery this afternoon. The surgeon, she said, was extremely positive about how the surgery went and the outcome. It is not yet known when Bishop Marc will be released from the hospital, but that will happen in the next few days.
The Andrus family are all very grateful for the prayers and good wishes that they have received and they look forward to this time of healing.
Last Monday I took part in a service at Grace Cathedral initiating a week of intense work by a group of four Tibetan lamas, and a group of teenagers from Oakland, part of Tools for Peace, wherein they created intricate, harmoniously beautiful mandalas made of colored sand.
Each element of the spiritual project had been undertaken with attentiveness. For instance, the sand itself was gathered at a spot in the Himalayas, brought to the United States for the purpose of making these particular mandalas, and dyed here.
There were several layers of meaning attached to this week-long project: the creation of the mandala is a way of proclaiming the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence; and also raising awareness and support for Tools for Peace.
Tools for Peace is an educational program, currently supplemental to school curriculums, that helps young people live compassionately, mindfully, non-violently. Not only that, but Tools for Peace helps process negative feelings, like aggression, anger, and competitiveness.
Venerable Lama Chödak Gyatso Nubpa is the spiritual center of Tools for Peace. The teacher of both Jamie Price, the executive director of Tools for Peace, and k.d. lang, both of whom devote themselves to this inspiring work to change the lives of young people in our urban schools, Lama Gyatso was unable to be present during the mandala project at Grace Cathedral, due to illness.
The week culminated with several linked events of intense beauty, power, and meaning. Saturday night several hundred people gathered in the nave of Grace Cathedral to see the completed mandalas. k.d. lang sang five songs of unmatched purity and beauty; three young people and two teachers who have worked with Tools for Peace spoke; a team of chefs who work with Alice Waters prepared and served a beautiful meal in a transformed Gresham Hall of the cathedral. All of the above helped people understand the work of Tools for Peace and to raise financial support for this important work.
Today, after the 11 o’clock Eucharist at Grace Cathedral, the mandalas were ritually destroyed, all the precise colored patterns swept into the center of each mandala, scooped up and poured into the San Francisco Bay. One of the lamas gave a teaching on impermanence before the ritual dissolution. He likened the creation and destruction of the mandalas as like a nation having an army, or a home having a security system; by meditating on impermanence we learn to value our lives, moment by moment, not have the fullness of life robbed by investing in false ideas of permanence.
My own thoughts while taking part in sweeping away the beautiful patterns of the mandalas were that not only are seemingly-durable structures of violence and injustice in fact passing, but also that there is a great relief in knowing that even beautiful work, heartfelt and good, also, as such, always coming to an end, that it can be laid down without thought to its enduring. All these thoughts were very freeing.
Bringing my meditation into my Christian faith, I thought of love enduring, and God also enduring, though structures that contain love, and ways of understanding God are subject to impermanence.
I felt a deep connection with the Tools for Peace people, and a loving respect for them and their work. I hope for a lively, ongoing relationship that will be of service to a suffering world, and will promote deepening, mutual understanding.
I’m a member of a coalition of bishops called Bishops Working for a Just World, that’s been around most of the seven-plus years I’ve served as a bishop. In the beginning I was the liaison between the coalition and Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation (EGR), where I was a board member.
The work of EGR has been to promote the understanding and engagement of The Episcopal Church in the Millennium Development Goals. Being involved with the MDG work has been transformative for me. It has taken me to the UN Plaza in New York to be part of vigil to keep the UN’s attention on the MDGs; to the White House as part of an ecumenical lobbying group of faith leaders; to South Africa with the Pilgrimage for Peace and participation in the TEAM Conference, focusing on the MDGs and particularly on AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa; into work with Bonnie Anderson writing some of the legislation that helped The Episcopal Church embrace the MDGs in the 2006 General Convention.
Within Bishops Working for a Just World I’ve had the privilege of working closely with the highly professional, talented, dedicated staff of The Episcopal Church’s Washington Office of Government Relations. They brief BWJW members of legislation related to policy stances The Episcopal Church has taken in General Convention, and have facilitated lobbying efforts by member bishops on the Hill in DC each fall.
From both these organizations and related experiences I’ve learned that lobbying, and advocacy is extremely important, and deeply unappreciated within the life of the Church.
I just came back from the fall gathering of some BWJW members in Washington, where the six of us attending were greatly aided by the Government Relations staff to do congressional lobbying in the areas of health care, immigration, environment, and education.
Our lobbying is not based on any one bishop’s personal opinions, but comes directly from resolutions passed at our General Conventions. Thus, for example, we put forward support of a health care reform that would provide universal health care, at an excellent level for all Americans, with a preference for a single-payer system, or, failing that, a public option.
Episcopalians are active in their communities, promoting so much good based on their deeply understood and held faith values, inculcated by our sacramental worship and the preaching-in-community. The next horizon is to help our lawmakers know of both the work you do, and the values you hold dear.
Daily Bread
Last week I wrote about the common pressures of our world, the shared adversity of a time and moment, having the shaping power of kneading, if we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit in our passage through the difficulty, or, indeed, if we ask the Holy Spirit to illumine our memories of that which we’ve experienced.
The day I wrote I received the results from a prostate biopsy. The biopsy showed that cancer was present, “low grade.” My age (young for prostate cancer) and some features of the cancer, however, pushed strongly towards a surgical treatment.
My primary-care physician (Karen Khoo), urologist (Stuart Rosenberg), and surgeon (Peter Carroll) are all superb, I’ve been timely about my annual check-ups, and this is a common cancer, caught at an early, low-grade stage, and I have the most loving, strong supportive wife and daughters; that is, I have, I think, good prospects.
Still, cancer frightens me. Cancer killed both my father and his brother. I’ve had in my mind since I was a young adult that I wanted to live long enough that my daughters wouldn’t lose their father as early in life as I did, and I didn’t want to put Sheila through grief and loss. Below all that was the deposit of grief, incomprehension, chaos and fear that engulfed me when my father died.
So, I was starting my day with spiritual reading and centering prayer, my normal way of entering the gift of another day of life. As you may know, I’ve been reading my way slowly through Carol Lee Flinders’ rich exposition of the lives of seven Christian women mystics. That day I was still in the midst of the section on Teresa of Avila. I was reminded in the text that Teresa had written a detailed meditation on each phrase of the Lord’s Prayer. For my centering prayer, thus, I chose, “Give me this day my daily bread.”
What I understood from this prayer time was that all that came to me that day, the diagnosis, my fear, my prayers, the love of my family, and of the great people I work with at DioHouse, and the expanding circle of prayer that has been coming my way from that moment – all of this is my daily bread.
Let me push a little further in my understanding of daily bread: might we not say that when we have raised to consciousness the shared suffering of our world, we become like bread, not only passively related, but fruitfully inter-related. Charles Williams’ doctrine of Co-Inherence comes to mind here, which I think was what C.S. Lewis was living into when he prayed that he would be allowed to receive some of his wife’s physical pain and suffering, so that she might experience some relief.
Kneaded by the travail of the world, with our willing openness to the godly possibilities for transformation inherent in all life, we become related to one another in such a way that something beautiful occurs – all of life can be received like wholesome bread.
The Witness of Others – Bread and Body
And so, as people have learned about my cancer, I’ve been getting telephone calls, handwritten notes, and emails from people who, in addition to assuring me of their love and prayers, have become heartbreakingly, beautifully vulnerable by telling me their own stories, or those of their lovers or family members, as they faced frightening illnesses.
I realized how costly the recounting of these stories was, how it was bringing back all the fear, and in some cases the loss associated with the different diseases faced. They did this out of love for me. In this I learned a new way to understand and define prayer, and I thought, here is my daily bread, produced out of suffering and pain, and transmuted by these human bearers of Christ into something life giving.
My surgery is scheduled for September 28, not long away. I’m not planning on writing a great deal about all this, but today, both to try and be helpful to those for whom a little information might be comforting, and to provide my own small understanding of what this all means, I thought it was important to write.
Teaching at Episcopal High School set, if any more setting were needed, school patterns into my overall life. Summer reading, the idea of paying particular attention to a book or a few books over the course of the summer, and then taking learnings from those books into conversation as the “new year” gets underway, in order to learn further, is one of these habits instilled from the years at EHS.
My companion during July and August of this summer was Carol Lee Flinders’ rich book, Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics. There are a bewildering number of insights in the book, expressed in vivid metaphors drawn directly from the works of the subject women, insightfully culled and commented upon by Flinders. In the course of my slow reading of the book, and image and a related idea took hold for me, and gained meaning in the light of contemporary events.
One woman wrote about God “kneading” her, and at the end of the book, which proceeds chronologically, as Flinders treats of Thérese of Liseaux, we read, “With the story of Thérese, and only with her story, we see a fully realized mystic and saint portrayed as someone living at the center of a web of intense relationships: embedded, that is, in an intimate personal context within which everyone is continually affecting everyone else.”
I began to understand the much earlier reference to being “kneaded” as what Thérese was experiencing in her Carmelite community at the end of the 19th century, and by design. But what about all of us, are we not all, always, in a web in which we are all being continually affected by everyone, and everything? Are we, not only religious who have plunged into community with intentionality, being “kneaded?”
While I was reading Enduring Grace I became aware that numbers of our friends, spread over the North American continent and Europe, were experiencing similar disturbing symptoms: panic attacks, depression, anxiety. I remembered sitting in on a lecture in the Wisdom University, meeting in Chartres, two years ago, and hearing the lecturer say that Jung predicted the advent of World War II some years before 1940 because of the increasingly violent dreams his German-speaking Swiss patients were reporting to him. They then, and our friends now were all being “kneaded” by the events of the world.
Yesterday I made bread, a process that is spread out over the whole day. In the second stage of the bread making, when I kneaded the dough, I prayed the Jesus Prayer, and from deep within a meditation emerged: there is the possibility, when global distress is upon us, that we may be formed, as dough is formed, into something wholesome and beautiful. Under the constant pressure of the kneading, the protein unfolds and creates structure and texture. The length of time the dough rises creates depth of flavor. Finally, the fire transforms what time and pressure have prepared into the desired, delicious bread, one good thing out of the inert, disconnected elements that go into making the dough.
The end result, however, is not certain, it is a possibility. The pressure of global distress, working on all of us, kneading us, does not surely produce coherence and wholesomeness. The extra ingredient is what the mystics would call, I think, abandonment to the God who is with us in all this. Abandoned to Love we become whole and good together.
