A Beautiful Place

A Beautiful Place

Mother Erika

It had been a very beautiful place. Not beautiful like a green hill far away, as the old hymn says. It was a hill, but it wasn’t green at all and hadn’t been green for years. It was brown, mostly, but not just brown but a crazy patchwork of rust and shadow, all hazy and shimmering with dust. It wasn’t green, and it wasn’t far away from anything. It rubbed its rounded shoulder right up against the city wall; its wide foot nudged the bustling roadway that poured into one of the many city gates that gaped in the wall like mouths wide open. It wasn’t green; it wasn’t far away. It wasn’t idyllic. It wasn’t quiet. It wasn’t pastoral or peaceful or picturesque. It was a hill, like lots of little hills, but it had been beautiful.

It’d been beautiful because it had been, years so, a place of vital, and constant, activity. This hill had hummed, buzzed with busy men climbing up and down its paths with chisels and hammers and ropes. The face of the hill was in perpetual motion – day and night, men went up, stones came down, wave upon wave, and everything utterly awash with noise. The hill thundered with the boom of the mallet’s thump, with the deep crack of the rocks when the chisels found their way home, with the creak of ropes as stones were lifted and tied and dragged and dropped, and with the groans and sighs and laughs of men.

Masons, they had been, stonecutters, who had worked this hill their whole lives long. They had climbed this hill since they were old enough to swing a hammer, and cut it apart, piece by piece. They had cut and climbed for years, for generations, breaking out blocks of limestone that was as treasured as gold or as diamonds. For it was stone from this hill that had given shape to the very city it sat next to; stone from this hill that had formed the walls of Jerusalem, strengthened its gates and its passageways, maybe even grounded the very temple itself. And this stone had given shape to the lives of the men who worked to pry it out of the earth, who spent their youth and then their old age crawling over and into the sides of this hill, and to the women who worked at home and waited for their husbands’ return, work-weary and dusty but proud of their beautiful brown hill and its strong white stone.

But one day, one man threw the weight of his body into the final blow of his hammer and heard a sound that no one on that hill could remember ever hearing before. It was a dull thunk, and a shushing, as a wide crack crumbled open in front of him, right in the center of the hill. Pebbles and earth and flakes of rock sloughed off in sheets, and what was left behind, underneath all of that valuable limestone, meant that nothing would ever be the same on this hill again. For the hill had had a secret, hidden deep within its heart – a flaw, a fault line that no one had ever known was there. The men stood before this flaw for hours, it seemed, shaking their heads, scratching their rough chins, the younger ones making suggestions about how they might work around it, but the older ones knowing in their own hearts what this discovery really meant – that the hill was a ruin, that no rock would ever be quarried from it again, for no rock from this hill could ever again be trusted to bear the weight of the world. This hill, they knew, was done. It was finished.

And so the hill sat, abandoned, for years and years. Its paths, once so familiar and well-worn, quickly became choked with brush and dry weeds. The limestone which had once shined so clean and white in the sun was soon drowned in the dirt, and it, like the hill, soon was forgotten, as men traveled along other roads to other hills to quarry other stone. And the hill which had once been so beautiful because it had once been worth so much to so many, sat quiet and invisible, meaning nothing to no one.

Until one day, a single man stood on the Jerusalem road and looked up at this wreck of a hill and had an idea. Would not this place, as worthless and ugly as it was, be the perfect place for a dump? Not a dump for refuse – old baskets and broken pottery and stained cloth – but for the true trash of the earth – a place for dumping people, criminals, threats to the imperial power of Rome. Would not this place, as worthless and ugly as it was, be the perfect place for an execution?

And so the hill that had once been so valued and so beautiful became a place that struck fear in the hearts of men. Women rushed by it on their way into the city, eyes averted, looking at anything but those heights where men went to die terrible, agonizing deaths. Children dared each other to climb its slopes before bored soldiers or protective mothers could discover what they were up to. And week after week, some horrible procession made its way up its paths, now widened to accommodate their new travelers. Week after week, some prisoner was stabbed and prodded and kicked up the hill, while soldiers jabbed the latest wooden cross into place along one of the wide gashes in the stone. Week after week, some new torture, some new blood and tears, some new death. Week after week, the condemned went up, and the corpses came down. And the sides of the hill that had been carved out and put to use, giving new life to a wall or well somewhere, now looked empty and haunted, like vast eye sockets staring numbly at the city walls. Locals began to call it the place of the skull – perhaps because of its shocked, empty eyes or perhaps because of the hundreds of skulls that were beaten and bruised on its bloody slopes.

And all the while, that great seam of ruin, that fatal flaw ran down the center of the hill, mocking all who looked up at it. This place that used to give life now has nothing to offer but death. This place is broken and destroyed; it is full of weakness and fault, and there is no health left within it. It is a hill beyond hope, beyond redemption, always in shadow, always in night. The place of the skull, the place of evil and death, Golgatha.

One day, three more prisoners are prodded and kicked up the hill. And soldiers stab another cross into the crust of the earth. And one more man gasps and wheezes and bleeds. But this man, when he looks out from high atop the hill, sees not ugliness and pain and death, but beauty. He sees only beauty, only the devotion of the people who have followed him here, only the love of his mother and his cherished, beloved disciple. He sees only the thumbprint of God in the people who look up at him from the foot of his cross, even the soldiers whose fingers roll stones and gamble for his clothes right under his feet. He sees only grace here within the embrace of his outstretched arms, only holiness in this place that can bear so much pain. This man looks out upon this hill, upon these people, upon all of these fatal flaws running right down the middle and says no more. You are all forgiven. You are all redeemed. You are all so beautiful. After that, there was nothing to be said. The ugliness was done; it was all finished. So the man bowed his head and gave up his spirit. And the little hill and everyone on it felt the shift in the earth, the crack in the cosmos, as everything was changed.

Of course that little hill is now beautiful again. It is crowned with glory – covered with chapels and holy places and gold and diamonds. People have brought stone from other places to lay altars and tabernacles there; people come from all over the world to climb this little hill. And that is all well and good. But this hill didn’t become beautiful again because of engraved candlesticks and jeweled crosses; this hill became beautiful again because that of that great love, held high upon the cross. This hill became beautiful again because of that man who looked out upon the dust of that brown and broken place and said You are not forsaken. There is nothing so broken in you that I cannot fix. There is nothing so awful in you that I cannot love. There is nothing so dead in you that I cannot revive. There is nothing so sinful in you that I cannot redeem. There is nothing so ugly in you that I cannot admire. For your heart, your flawed, broken, sometimes dusty, sometimes lonely heart, is worth everything to me, for it is mine. And it is a beautiful place.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

3 April 2015 - Good Friday

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

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