Blog

And yet when I see this brass celtic cross in our rood screen, as I sit in the church for worship or meditation, my mind sees a steering wheel.  I know.  Not very spiritual.

The encircled cross in the rood screen reminds me that I am small and that is the great gift of a cathedral.  We enter a magnificent building and are a bit relieved and much inspired by its beauty and majesty.  The roof soars, the columns stand against time, the glass sparkles and the blues and oranges conspire to create a feminine light which enfolds.

Having these little steering wheels dot the rood screen remind me of the toy car I had a child.  That toy car had a wheel like this brass one and it was about the same size. In that car I could pretend to drive like my father did in our real car. But I was pretending to be a man when in fact I was a child with a toy car.  And the small wheel (cross) in the rood screen reminds me that in the majesty and glitter of the cathedral and my role in its human fabric as a Canon Steward, I am not God.  I am not the driver.  I may preside.  I may lead.  I may even make a few new things happen but I am not God. The story of Adam and Eve is a story about the grief and sadness of realizing not only that we are not God; but that trying to be God is a temptation to dis-order with terrible ramifications of relational destruction. We see it daily in the news.

Life can be so confusing.  There is grief and loss, regret and dismay, envy and betrayal. Feeling small and realizing that my driver’s wheel is imaginary is a huge relief.  I may take exception to how God runs things, but the Psalms are there to help me work that out. A theologian friend of mine reminds me that God seems to be less interventionist than invitationalist. God invites us along and invites out of us what we can offer.  Being along for the ride strikes at our pride.  But for me, it is a relief not to be God.  It is a relief to be right-sized.  It is a relief to say the creeds, say my prayers (even the angry ones) and believe that God is steering the cosmos towards goodness by inviting one good, kind human choice at a time.

Yours is the day, O God, yours also the night; you established
the moon and the sun. You fixed all the boundaries of the
earth; you made both summer and winter.    Psalm 74:15,16

Last night I was in a terrible mood for the evening office. The Chapter of priests (six of us) define our life together in part by the Rule of life we live, which includes our commitment to gather in the chapel every morning and every evening for the morning ad evening offices  (morning prayer and evening prayer).  Each office takes about 20 minutes and comes from the tradition of cathedral chapters having emerged from monastic cathedral communities.

By gathering each day in the morning and evening and for the Eucharist, we stop the action of the day and ground it in God.  It is so easy, in any vocation, but especially in the priesthood, to get one’s self-esteem from one’s job. But the offices remind us that the place to go for praise and adulation is not the vestry meeting nor the coffee hour but rather, the act of prayer.

When I walked into evening prayer it was the last place in which I wanted to be.  But as I spoke these opening sentences to the office drawn from the psalms, I was reminded that there is a bigger picture.  The things about which my mind had chosen to complain were not very important.  It was just a story in my head that it was a bad day.  Indeed it was a very good day.  But most importantly it was not MY day at all.

The beauty of going to church, especially in a majestic cathedral such as St. John’s in the Wilderness, is that one is reminded of one’s simultaneously being deeply loved and really rather insignificant.  I took this picture because when I pass this window medallion in the hallway to the bathroom, I am reminded that I am just a small piece of the gathered glass. It lightens my mood an it reminds me that the God who has crated this stunning planet has everything under control and though I would lead the world differently were I God, I am not.  What a relief to be an aging, balding, rather insignificant good man on a team of beautiful clergy, congregants and staff.  What a relief that the day is not mine, but is God’s.