First Day of Church Fall

Yes, Patricia did say “wuss” in church today for the first time, something she realized after she’d done it. Actually she quoted the word “wuss” in this email from a reader of her sermon “Glenn Beck’s God Is Not My God.”

“Frankly, Templeton,” he wrote, “my God can actually, you know…do stuff. Your deity is a weak, impotent, little wuss who can’t seem to do much of anything without human help. Why anyone would ever be attracted to your pathetic excuse for a deity completely escapes me.”

I’m pulling this from the sermon first because it tickles me. But, anyway, so Patricia’s response:

“I say there is true strength in compassion.

I say there is courage in the fight for justice.

I say there is toughness in love and grace and forgiveness.

And there is nothing wussy or impotent or pathetic about it.”



And Amen.

I think that the way people perceive God is a clear indication of their mental state. But God Herself, of course, just Is. Despite all of the bad we are capable of and that we commit, we still have the capacity to hope for the best in our natures to prevail. That’s Her.

On a separate subject, I have to say that I think my mother Mary met just about everyone in the St. Dunstan’s directory this morning as I wheeled her around from the narthex to the parish hall and kitchen, and back to the choir room, so she could see it while the choir was in the sanctuary rehearsing before the service. It really is its own little sanctuary, and feels like it’s sort of nestled in the woods with all of the glass.

She laughed in Sunday School (our first day back! “Christianity for the Rest of Us”), shared Hymnal and Prayer Book with me (which meant I didn’t have to stand for anything), and enjoyed both drinking and spilling multiple cups of coffee, until when we got in the car the first thing she said was “I think I’ve had too much coffee.” She was completely charmed.

So whatever God has on Her resume—if She can fly a plane or program a computer—whatever the skills Patricia’s reader above may have had in mind—I do know this: She would have been pleased—hey, perhaps She was even present—to see us gathered this first day of church fall as a community, moving as easily (and lovingly I might add) around each other as amoebas in a Petri dish.

The True Meaning of Clotheslines

I once worked on a photo essay with a photographer, whose specialty was light. His gift was light, knowing where to find it, how to cast it to create shadows. The photo essay focused on clotheslines and we drove around for hours in the old Cabbage Town, before it became gentrified. We found clotheslines at small cinder block ministries with descendants of the original mill workers, and clotheslines in the mountains, with sheets and work clothes billowing in the wind, a young mother with cowboy boots balancing a wicker clothes basket on one hip, a long King cigarette between her lips, her fingers working the clothes pins as she talked. She was beautiful.

That was 15 years ago, but what made me think of it is the clothesline that is beginning to make a spider's web through the forest that is my backyard. The September light, the clarity, the bright cool yellow making shadows on the white and orange and pink fabrics that are strung above the green ivy, protected from the sun by dogwoods and a wall of giant bamboo.

So what’s the point? The simplest thing in the world is actually quite beautiful, even an ordinary clothesline. Whatever Stephen Hawking has to say about God, I think that the smallest bit of life is something of a miracle. A clothesline is such a minor detail, yet it makes us mindful of earth and wind. It says, “This is how basic human needs are—nothing is that complicated.”

It’s not. Communion, for instance. This morning I rushed up to the altar at the last minute but Patricia had saved me a piece of bread fit for a mouse. (I think she counts each one of us like a flock.) There was Claudia and Gilda and the silver chalice. It made me smile. The candles, the choir, quite simple, ancient even, yet unbelievably beautiful.

Simple as the act of putting away dishes, love comes. Simple as the subtle wind that is our breath, God comes.