Cut Your Turf & Hold Your Bog

Cut Your Turf & Hold Your Bog

Father Mullen

A couple of years ago, a friend and I were riding horses around the Irish countryside during a summer vacation, and we kept coming across signs posted on telephone poles and fences with these words spelled out in clear, bold, plain letters: Cut Your Turf & Hold Your Bog.  We understood vaguely that these signs must refer in some way to the famous Irish peat bogs, but we couldn’t fathom what the real meaning of the message was: Cut Your Turf & Hold Your Bog.

When we asked locals, we discovered that the signs are a rallying cry in a controversy over land conservation.  The Irish government and the EU have designated some peat bogs as conservation areas, and have banned the collection of peat (which the Irish call “turf”) from those bogs.  Turf has been used for centuries in Ireland as a heating fuel, although as such it is perhaps more a part of Irish heritage than necessity, these days.  The signs we saw represent an odd conflict, since they too call for a kind of conservation: the desire to hold on to a traditional Irish way of life, and the rights to cut turf on land long held by families for that reason.   But bogs take about 100 years to replenish after they’ve been cut.  And these days when most turf is cut by industrial machinery and not by hand, it’s estimated that 40% of Ireland’s bogs have been depleted or destroyed in the last twenty years.  So if you cut your turf, you may not have very much bog to hold on to for very long.

The peat bogs of Ireland hold another fascination, since a great host of unusual objects have been found buried and well-preserved in the peat.  In addition to the cooking vessels, spear heads, jewelry, ancient tools, and crockery you’d expect to hear about, hundreds of barrels of butter have also been found in the bogs – placed there to preserve the butter, then forgotten about I suppose.  A recently discovered well-preserved barrel was dated to be 3,000 years old (though the butter is sadly now past its use-by date).  Most famously, the bogs have given up their dead – ancient human bodies with the skin still intact (preserved by the unique characteristics of the bog environment).  Two years ago the oldest such body ever found was discovered in an Irish bog, and has been judged to be about 4,000 years old.  If you cut your turf and hold your bog, who knows what you will find buried within the dark, wet peat?

The modern Irish poet Seamus Heaney has reflected that “if you go round the National Museum in Dublin, you will realize that a great proportion of the most cherished material heritage of Ireland was ‘found in a bog.’”[i]  But the poet realized that it was not just a material culture that was preserved in the bog, it was something more.  He said, “I began to get an idea of bog as the memory of the landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it.”

“A landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it.”  This is a fascinating idea on Maundy Thursday night, when, whether you know it or not, we are reflecting deeply on our collective Christian memory.  We are, in a sense, digging into the peat bog of Jesus’ story to extract again a crucial part of that story that took place on the night before he was handed over to suffering and death.  More to the point, we are bringing up an ancient Body, and making the claim that a great deal more than the skin is intact.  We are digging into ancient Christian memory, and finding that what we have is not just well-preserved, it is still living.

That, at least, is what the church has long believed she is doing when she follows our Lord’s instruction to “do this in remembrance of me.”  The remembrance, in this case, is not expected to be a mental exercise, or even a tradition of story-telling.  It is, rather, intended as a digging down into the bog to find a memory that has been not only long-preserved but is still breathing, and that was put there deliberately to keep it alive and intact, just like the butter in the bucket.

In a very real sense, this living memory is the energy of the church – certainly it is in this parish.  Whether or not you are here to see it dug up and consumed day by day is hardly the point.  The point is that even when the boiler in the undercroft stops heating the church, as sometimes happens, this fuel keeps burning, this memory keeps breathing, this Body keeps living.

At various times in history it has seemed quaint at best, and downright odd, or at least counter-cultural to cling to this living memory of the Mass, the Eucharist, the way we do in this parish, just as it seems odd to think of the Irish tramping out to the bog to cut turf to burn in their stoves.  Coal and oil and natural gas have long since replaced turf as inexpensive fuels that are far more efficient.  Likewise, there are many aspects of modern life that make the Mass look outmoded, to put it kindly.  But there is something authentic and real about cutting turf, drying it, and bringing it home to burn in the stove: there’s something Irish about it, even if not all the Irish do it anymore, like speaking Gaelic.  And whatever there is that’s Irish about it is made all the more so by the poet’s observation that the turf itself is cut from a landscape that remembers everything that has happened in and to it, a landscape that doesn’t easily let go of the cooking vessels, the spear heads, the jewelry, ancient tools, and crockery, the barrels of butter, or even the bodies.  Which is why the cry goes up to Cut Your Turf & Hold Your Bog!  It’s another way of demanding that the Irish remember what it means to be Irish and not just another far-flung corner of the European Union.

And there is something real and absolutely authentic about what we do here tonight, about coming together at an altar, taking bread, blessing it, breaking it, and sharing it, just as our Lord did, and instructed his followers to do in remembrance of him.  In fact, there may be nothing more authentically Christian than this simple act, this deep memory that we repeat over and over because Jesus expected his disciples to, and so do we.  Gathered together like this, on this night, we become like a part of the landscape that remembers everything that’s happened in and to it.  And we take our spades and dig deeply and directly into the dark, wet peat of Christian memory. 

All kinds of things may come up with the peaty memory.  I think of my grandmother’s funeral mass, and of a Palm Sunday when my mother played the violin, and of a boyhood Easter when my voice soared easily to high B-flats, and of Masses said in the Australian bush, or in churches around Jerusalem.  I treasure these memories; they are the turf that I cut and the bog that I hold. 

And you will have your memories that the Mass connects you to, as well. 

And the church has a larger collection of memories that we bring up with the peat: of papal masses, and crusaders’ masses, and pilgrims’ masses, and nuptial masses, and masses for peace, and for harvests, and for saints, and in monasteries, and palaces, and in country churches, and in catacombs.  All this living memory comes up when we dig into the peat tonight: the landscape that remembers.  But that is not the half of it.

Tonight of all nights we dig that spade into the sweet spot of the bog that holds the memory of that first supper, and we bring up the Body.  There is nothing more fundamentally, authentically Christian than this act, and the corporate memory that comes with it. 

Bringing up the Body of Christ from the landscape of his church, from the dark, wet bog of the Mass, we do not marvel at how wonderfully preserved that Body is after all these years.  No, we rejoice to behold again and again that he is alive and with us (nothing else could account for this long, living memory)! And un-like the Irish bogs, we need not fear that we can exhaust the supply of God’s grace – for it is inexhaustible.

To do this day after day is to hold on to, live into, and to refuse to let go of the thing that makes us who we really are, and that is so much more than a memory.  To do this is to Cut Your Turf & Hold Your Bog.

Cut Your Turf & Hold Your Bog!  Return again to this landscape that remembers everything that has happened in and on it!  Reach out your hand to take a morsel of the dark, wet turf that is given for you!  Hold on to this memory!  Bring up the Body!  Taste and see: there is nothing here well-preserved!  For this is Life itself!  Thanks be to God! 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Maundy Thursday 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] Seamus Heaney, “Feeling into Words,” A lecture given at the Royal Society of Literature, October, 1974

That the King of Glory may come in

That the King of Glory may come in

Mother Nora Johnson

In case you missed it, this Sunday we made a great point of entering in: entering into Holy Week, entering with Jesus into Jerusalem to face the events of his passion and resurrection.  Marking a threshold as we pass from the ordinary events of our lives into this sacred week of concentrated prayer and liturgical participation.  Most of us will be living our ordinary lives as we always do this week, with doctors’ appointments and deadlines and errands, our workdays and our commutes, but we will also be conscious that we are living Jesus’s week: a triumphal entry into the city, an intimate last supper with his friends on Maundy Thursday, a harrowing night of prayer and a brutal crucifixion at noon on Good Friday.  There will be a period of mysterious silence and a bursting forth from the tomb as the darkness of Saturday evening becomes the great light of Easter Sunday.  

We will be living with two calendars this week, and feeling that odd sensation of moving back and forth between them. Many of us will dash home from work on Thursday, catching the train just in time to attend the last supper.  We will be a little groggy at the office the next morning because we were praying with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane late into the night.  Try explaining that to your coworkers. We may have to offer our regrets about not being able to attend that mid-day meeting on Friday so we can instead gather at the foot of the cross.  Saturday morning may find us pulled toward the usual round of errands and sports events even while we are haunted by a sense that our Lord has gone to be among the dead and will be risen from the grave in a short while.  We are living in two realities.

However we work to set aside these days, however firmly we mark the threshold between Holy Week and our ordinary lives, we will move between worlds with an unusual level of awareness this coming week.  We may feel that we are in two cities at once: Philadelphia and Jerusalem.  And crossing the threshold between them may be no small feat.

Then too, we may notice, as we cross the threshold into Jerusalem with Jesus this morning, that the situation here in this heavenly city is distinctly unsettling.  We’ve started off with a glorious procession, but it’s hard to tell exactly why the crowds are cheering.  Do they really understand who Jesus is?  And how is it that, here at the start of Holy Week, we are already going to be calling out “Crucify him!”  How is it both Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday?  Where did the week go?

It doesn’t get any simpler as the week goes on.  Glorious Maundy Thursday has its distinctly funereal aspects, and on Good Friday we may know resurrection joy despite our focus on the crucifixion.  The Easter Vigil takes us back through the whole sweep of salvation history, from the creation to the flood of Noah to the Passover and the exile.  We may be moving in time through the events of the crucifixion and resurrection, but the time we keep in the beautiful liturgy of Holy Week is strangely unstable.  It goes forward and backward at once.  It pulls us along in both directions.

Nor is our location stable.  We speak of the Resurrection as a new creation, and some speak of the entry into Jerusalem as a re-entry into the Garden of Eden.  We say that the cross on which Jesus dies is the tree of life.  We hear this week that we are experiencing a new Passover, crossing the Red Sea out of Egypt.  Crossing the Jordan River into the Holy Land.  Standing at the same time at that holy banquet in the New Jerusalem, at the Supper of the Lamb.

We mark a threshold, entering with our palms this morning, but it’s a threshold that brings us to the edge of all times, all places.  Where Jesus is.  At the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.

Love calls us here.  Love breaks us open, again and again, as we rush to the Last Supper from our workstations.  Love opens our hearts as we carry home our palms this afternoon, finding a place for them on a high shelf that the cats can’t get to.  As we stumble out into the dark night of Maundy Thursday, aware of Jesus in all the altars of repose all over the city and across the world.  Knowing that our fellow Christians are silently keeping vigil with us.

We are offered the grace this week to let our world break open so there will be room for God who knows no limitations.  God who is able to live a human life.  God who is able to bear humiliation and rejection and failure.  God who bears pain and death.  God whose response is never to save himself but always to save us.  Always to forgive us.  Always to receive our least gesture of willingness as a pledge of relationship. 

This week is our chance, awkward as we are, to meet that God in the person of Jesus.  Our small gestures, our divided attention, our shyness about removing a shoe to have our feet washed, our hesitation as we approach the cross, our sleepiness as we sit in the dark church at the Easter vigil, hearing prophecy after prophecy after prophecy, that strange warming of our hearts as the resurrection is proclaimed--these are the moments God gives us for crossing over into new life in which our limitations are not the last word.  Our sin is not the final reality.  Our fear is not the force that rules the world. 

Our times are in God’s hands, and this week of all weeks we may have the grace to know it.  He is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last.  The beginning and the end.

Lift up, lift up your heads oh ye gates.  Lift them up you everlasting doors, that the King of Glory may come in.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

Palm Sunday, 29 March 2015

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

Bizaro World

They said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”  (Jn. 12:21)

Because comic books never interested me very much as a kid, it was not until the sit-com Seinfeld was on TV that I became familiar with Bizaro.  Bizaro, Jerry Seinfeld, explains in a famous episode, is “Superman’s exact opposite, who lives in a backwards, bizaro world.  Up is down.  Down is up.  He says ‘Hello’ when he leaves, ‘Good bye’ when he arrives.”

If you remember the Seinfeld episode, the matter of Bizaro Superman comes up because Jerry’s friend Elaine has met a new friend very much like Jerry, except, as she explains to Jerry, that he is not so self-absorbed, not so distracted by the minutiae of unimportant things.  “He is reliable.  He is considerate,” Elaine says to Jerry,  “He’s like your exact opposite.”  Thus begins Elaine’s flirtation with a new group of three friends who are the kind, thoughtful, bookish counterparts to Jerry, George, and Kramer, who are goofy, self-centered, and never read anything but comic books.  Her new friends are the sort of bright doppelgangers of the flawed, quirky, moody trio of the three old friends we regular watchers know so well.

As the episode goes on, Elaine finds herself torn between her two sets of friends – which is really just an expression of being torn between her kinder, better self and her selfish, worse self.  And in the end, she simply doesn’t fit in with the bizaro world of the well-read version, considerate of Jerry, et al., and she ends up back where she began with Jerry, George and Kramer.

Sometimes the world we read about in the Gospels seems like a bizaro world – a world almost opposite to the world we live in, as though up is down, and down is up.  Take, for instance, the little episode we hear about in John’s Gospel today.  Jesus is in Jerusalem, he has already been greeted by the palm-waving throngs.  And along come some men who John calls “Greeks.”  We could talk about whether they are Greek-speaking Jews, or Gentiles who are trying to find favor with the God of the Jewish Temple, or whatever – but for our purposes this morning, that hardly matters.  That the seekers are identified as somehow different and distinct is not what makes them bizaro to my ears. 

Here’s what makes them bizaro – and maybe you will think so too – these guys stroll up to Phillip, and they blurt out this demand to him; they say: “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”

I am not sure I have ever heard anyone say anything like that to me in my life – and I am in the Jesus business.  But, no, in the world I live in, most people do not come looking for Jesus.  Oddly, this is often as true within the church as without: people simply are not looking for Jesus; and they most assuredly are not asking for him if they can’t find him.  I am not trying to be sarcastic or funny here; I am trying to be honest.  The church has not gotten good at closing its buildings down and selling its real estate because of all the people we encounter who are looking for Jesus, or who come asking us to show him to them.  The empty pews I see from here are not a reflection of the hordes who are looking for Jesus – at least not on this block of Locust Street.  And we are a healthy, happy, growing parish!  But still there is plenty of room for those who might see Jesus, but who do not seem to be looking for him!

I find it bizarre – maybe even bizaro – to think about such an encounter: that someone could walk up to me or to you and just say to us, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”  I hardly know how I’d reply!  It’s almost like the exact opposite of the world I live in.  Because in the world I live in even those of us who believe in and love Jesus are often more than a little careful not to speak of him out loud, and certainly we don’t want to be caught looking for him in the challenges, twists, and turns of life (even if privately we think about it).  We live in a world that has decided you should keep your faith to yourself, and in which it would probably be embarrassing to be seen to be looking for Jesus.  Rare, it seems, is the day that someone earnestly approaches the church with this searching question on his or her lips: “I wish to see Jesus.”  So rare, that when I hear it, it seems like a bizaro world.

On reflection, the concept of a bizaro world seems right at home in the Gospel of Jesus Christ – where things are often almost a mirror-image of the world we live in; where up is down, down is up, etc.

It was a bizaro idea of God’s to send his Son into the world as a weakling, a child, a harmless, unarmed teacher.

It was a bizaro world that Mary sang about – where the humble are exalted, and the rich are sent empty away.

It was a bizaro world that Jesus taught about on the mountain when he promised that the meek would inherit the earth and the peacemakers would be blessed.

It was a bizaro world Jesus was talking about when he told his followers that those who want to gain their lives must lose them, and those who lose their lives for his sake will gain eternal life.

It was a bizaro world at the Cross and at the Tomb – where death seemed to be having its say, as it always does, but where actually the covenant of new life was being enacted.

The Good News of Jesus Christ is bizaro news – the revelation that in Christ things are almost exactly the opposite of what they seem: the unjust, greedy, violent ways of this world will not prevail; the poor and the down-trodden will not be crushed; our worst selves need not always trump our better selves; truth will not always be buried beneath piles of spin; the broken, bruised, and battered can be healed; the shadow of death will not obliterate the light of life!

Why is it that outside these walls we so seldom speak of these things?  Why is it so difficult to imagine anyone asking to be shown the source of this hope?  Why do I find it bizaro to think of someone asking to see Jesus?

Well, I’m not at all sure there is any explanation of the bizaro.  But it can be helpful to become aware of the bizaro world.  And the real question is whether the bizaro world is a backwards reflection of the world we live in, or if it is the world we are actually living in.  Which is backwards, wrong, bizarre?

Part of what was so appealing about season after season of Seinfeld was that as goofy, quirky, and self-centered as Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer were, we could always see at least a little of ourselves in them.  And if there was a defining characteristic of Jerry and his friends, it was that they were self-absorbed and selfish, ill-attuned to the needs or concerns of others around them, even those they loved the most.  And the thought that the world could be kind, considerate, selfless, and giving – well this was a bizaro idea to them: it was the shadow side of their own selfishness.

At the end of the episode, Elaine walks into the neat and tidy apartment of the bizaro version of Jerry, and discovers it to be the mirror image of Jerry’s place.  She is astounded at how familiar yet different it all is.  She opens the fridge, takes out a jar of olives and begins nibbling on them.  Bizaro Jerry looks over and asks, “Hey, what are you doing?”

“Eating olives,” Elaine says.

“Have you ever heard of asking?” comes, what is to her, the bizaro response.  For, she had indeed never thought of asking.

Within a few moments she has realized how poorly she fits in to this kind, polite, considerate, bizaro world, and she is on the way out the door to return to Jerry and the guys.

Daily, I am aware of how bizarre, greedy, frightening, difficult, dangerous, and self-centered the world we live in has become.  Perhaps it has always been this way, I don’t know; but it seems to be getting worse to me.

I have begun to suspect that this world we live in is actually the bizaro version of what God intends for us: a peaceful, fruitful, happy existence that is full of joy.

But we have become confused about what is reality and what is bizaro.

Jesus comes into the world to show us what a bizaro world it has become, and to teach us that love and kindness are what God created us for – not the reverse image of his creation.

I hear people yearning for a world that is better than the one we live in.  I know people who are working hard for just such a world.  But there are not enough of us yet, not enough who want to leave the bizaro world behind and discover again the true life for which God made us – the life of love and joy and peace.

Sometimes I want to scream about it, since I believe that Jesus is the Way we will get there, the Truth we are looking for, and the Life we suspect we have already lost.  I want people to meet Jesus, and I want to meet him again and again myself in my prayers, in those of you who work and live in his Name, and in the countless ways he shows himself in the world by the power of his Spirit.  I want to shout out to this world of ours: “Hey, what are you doing?!?!”

And if the answer should come back to me, “Oh, just looking for Truth, Peace, and Love,” then I want to be ready to reply:

“Have you ever thought of asking?”

Let’s all think of asking, over and over again: “We wish to see Jesus!”

And when the bizaro day comes that someone asks that very thing of each of us, let us rejoice, and show them the Way!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

22 March 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia