Hefted

It’s not every day at my age that you learn a new word, so I was thrilled this summer to come across a word that was unknown to me, while reading a book about sheep farming and shepherding.  The word is “heft,” but not in the sense of lifting or carrying.

A “heft” in northern England is “a piece of upland pasture to which a farm animal has become hefted.”  Or, to put it from the animal’s point of view, to be hefted is “to become accustomed and attached to an area of upland pasture.”  The word is in use in the Lake District in the north of England, where the sheep are grazed on the fells – the high green hills – on “unfenced common land.”  Without walls or fences, “in theory,” writes James Rebanks in his excellent book, The Shepherd’s Life, the “sheep could wander right across the Lake District.  But they don’t, because they know their place on the mountain.  They are ‘hefted,’ taught their sense of belonging by their mothers as lambs – an unbroken chain of learning that goes back thousands of years.”

So, on the one hand there are the sheep.  And on the other hand is the land: common land, not in the sense that it is completely without ownership or rent, but in the sense that ownership notwithstanding, the land is used by the farmers in common with one another.  And so, on yet another hand, there are the farmers, who are “commoners.”  As Rebanks writes, “‘commoner’ isn’t a dirty word here; it is a thing to be proud of.  It means you have rights to something of value, that you contribute to the management of the fells, and that you take part in our way of life as an equal with the other farmers.”[i]  Apparently the sheep aren’t the only thing hefted to the land.  It would seem that the people are, in a real sense, “hefted” there too. It means you have rights to something of value, that you contribute to it, and that you take part in a way of life as an equal.  Hefted.

Reading about the hefting of sheep and they way they graze on common land plucks at rural strings of my heart that I hardly know exist, bringing out my inner Wordsworth, the great poet of the Lake District:

“The world is too much with us – late and soon.

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away….”[ii]

Yes, we have given our hearts away.  If there is one thing we modern, urban people are not, it is hefted.  We are not hefted to place or family or custom.  And often, we are not hefted to church or to God.  The world is too much with us, getting and spending; we lay waste our powers, all too ready to move on to the next adventure or opportunity.  And who can say that this is all good or all bad?  Not me.  What I can say, is that even though we live here in the city, it may be that there is still hefting to be done, if any will do it. Because it means you have rights to something of value, that you contribute to it, and that you take part in a way of life as an equal.  And that’s a good thing, I am certain.  Hefted.

Every year at this time, we open up the Bible and who should pop out of it but someone like this poor widow with her two copper coins worth only a penny, whom Jesus espies from across the temple courts.  (Yes, she had to scrape together two coins just to come up with a penny!)  And Jesus calls his disciples to him because it’s a teaching moment. “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on."  You don’t really need me to explain this to you further, I think.  Nor do you need me to turn it into a guilt trip, or a pep talk – though on the right day, I am willing to do either.  I think you understand this teaching moment.

And that poor widow didn’t show up faithfully with her two copper coins (her widow’s mite) because some preacher had convinced her to with a guilt trip or a pep talk the previous week.  No, she gave what she had, what she could, what she wanted to give; she gave so generously, so sacrificially, because she had been hefted to God long ago, and to the worship of God in his temple.  She knew she had rights to something of value, that she needed to contribute to it, and that she took part in a holy way of life as an equal.

Every year - as we think about what it means to be good stewards of all that God has given to us, and of the work and ministry to which God has called us – every year we are presented with these widows, or these servants and their talents, or with this farmer who has two sons.  And every year you brace yourselves, I suppose, as I walk up to the pulpit with some clever way to ask you, or tell you, or beg you to give your money to the church, to give it to God, to give it away!  (And on any given day, I am generally willing to ask you, or tell you, or beg you to do so!)

But, frankly, I am not all that interested in fund raising here.  And, while I think there is a time and a place for fund raising in the church, I do not think that November is it, just because the widow, and the talents, and the farmer and his sons, or whoever, pops out of the Bible at this time of year.  No, I am not principally interested in fund raising with all of you.  I am not principally interested in getting you to give your money to the church, believe it or not!

I am principally interested in getting you hefted: hefted to the church, and hefted to Jesus.  I am principally interested in getting you to become accustomed and attached to an area of upland pasture – and I hope that pasture will be here on Locust Street.  More particularly, I hope that high green hill will be Jesus.  And that means that I am principally interested in showing you that you have rights to something of value here, that you should contribute to it, and that you will be happier if you will take part in this way of life as an equal.  Then you will be, God willing, hefted.  Hefted to Saint Mark’s, and hefted to Jesus.  Hefted.

When you are hefted to the church and hefted to Jesus, in theory, you could still wander right across the globe, for there is nothing to keep you here, certainly nothing to keep you giving.  But when you are hefted to the church and to Jesus, you don’t wander so much, even though you may, in fact, go far afield, because you know your place on the mountain, so to speak, you have been taught your sense of belonging in an unbroken chain of learning that goes back thousands of years.  And when you are hefted to these high green hills then it will be of little worry to me that you have to make decisions every year about how much to give.  Because when you are hefted, you give more than I would ever dream of asking you to give.

In a gorgeous short film about the sheep and people who are hefted to the Lake District, a woman is talking about the sheep, but she might as well be talking about herself, or about us:  “Once they’ve got hefted,” she says, “it’ll be very difficult to drive them off, as well.”  “It’s about where you belong.”  You “want to be on [your] heft.”

And another voice tells a story about how as a child he used to sneak up on sleeping lambs, up in the fells, to try to surprise them and catch them, and snuggle their wooly bodies before letting them run off.  And there was, he said, a flat stone in a field, that was warmed by the sun, and so it was a favorite place for lambs to lie, on the stone, to get warm.  And it was an easy place to sneak up on a sleeping lamb, as a child, and catch that little lamb, and snuggle its wooly coat.  And they called that flat stone the “Lamb Stone.”[iii]

And I delight in the complexity, and craziness, and sophistication of this urban world we inhabit, and I know I wouldn’t last very long at all on a sheep farm in the Penines.  And I think it’s a good idea to be hefted, and to find your heft in a place where there’s a flat stone, that we might as well think of as the Lamb Stone, and that it’s warmed by the Sun.

And I pray that you and I will always be drawn back to this stone, the Lamb Stone, by some divine gift of homing.  For it means we have rights to something of value here on Locust Street, that we contribute to it, and that we take part in a holy way of life here as equals. 

It means we are hefted.  Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

8 November 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life, Flatiron Books, New York, 2015, pp 21-23

[ii] William Wordsworth, “The World is too much with us,” c. 1802

[iii] Hefted, produced and directed by Tom Lloyd, from Dreamtime Arts and Edenarts, 2012

Saint Mark's and the Life & Death of Phil Schultz

Phil Schultz was a guest at eh Saturday Soup Bowl for nearly thirteen years.  He attended nearly every Sunday Mass for all those years, and was in every meaningful way a member of this parish.  Phil was also homeless, and died in October 2015.  As we mourn his death we also wonder how we in the church and in society can do a better job of people like Phil who carry lots of invisible baggage, and who need our support, care, and love.  The Philadelphia Inquirer published an article about Phil's death that is worth reading.

Caterpillar Saints

My favorite among apocryphal writings – that is, the collection of writings that some people consider to be divinely inspired, but others do not – my favorite among these apocryphal writings, The New Yorker magazine, recently ran a marvelous cartoon that depicts a caterpillar having a conversation with a butterfly.  The butterfly’s wings are unfurled, and even in the black-and-white format of the magazine, you can tell that those wings are drenched with color.  The caterpillar, wrinkled, scrunchy, lumpy, and inelegant in comparison to the lovely butterfly, and flightless, of course, is looking up at the butterfly.  The butterfly is speaking, and says to the caterpillar, in what I can only assume to be a matter-of-fact tone, “The pay is actually about the same.”

Is there disappointment in this conversation?  Hard to say which of the two might be the more disappointed by the realization that the pay is about the same.  Is it the caterpillar, who sees before him his transformed destiny of beauty and flight, only to learn that his wages won’t go up?  Or is it the butterfly who has discovered that in her self-actualization of metamorphosis into something as beautiful as a butterfly, her paycheck had hardly increased?

Now, you send enough butterflies to business school and interesting things could happen.  For one thing, you might see the pay of some butterflies rise high above the pay of others.  CEO butterflies need to be well compensated, after all.  You’ve got to reward your talent.  For another thing, the MBA butterflies might write a report indicating how expensive it is to produce such colorful wings: the pigments are pricey, and the fabric for the wings, too.  And there is a lot of serious engineering that goes into each butterfly.  Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more efficient if caterpillars – most of them anyway – just remained caterpillars.  Metamorphosis is costly, time consuming, and complex – it need not be for everyone!

Plus, you send enough butterflies to business school and soon you are going to have cable TV: Caterpillar Cable.  Cable TV keeps the caterpillars amused at a cost (to the caterpillars) of only about a hundred bucks a month.  But what with all the channels, and now Netflix and Hulu and a reasonably fast WiFi connection too, the caterpillars are pretty distracted by entertainers – butterflies all – for whom the pay is not about the same at all, it is quite elevated, in fact.  (That’s what the market has determined; so who are the caterpillars to wonder about that?  But I digress.)  Soon enough, many of the caterpillars forget that once upon a time all caterpillars were meant to become butterflies.  Content with the content dished out in flat-screen, HD, 24-hour, on-demand entertainment, who’s going to bother with the trouble of becoming a butterfly?

True fact: last year the worldwide monarch butterfly population was down to only about 35 million, from what had once been an estimated population of one billion.[i]  Bad weather and a depleted supply of milkweed are cited as the causes.  But I have to wonder if it isn’t because the caterpillars are all choosing to stay home and watch cable, entertaining themselves out of a promise of beauty, purpose, and direction.  Who knows?

Here we are on All Saints Day.  And if you’ll allow me to put it this way, it’s the day we often think of as an opportunity for us caterpillars to give thanks to God for all the butterflies.  But do I need to say anything else, before I ask you if you see anything wrong with this picture?

I suppose caterpillar churches might be adorned with statues of butterflies.  But then you’d have to ask yourself: don’t they know what they are looking at when they glance up at those statues?

There is this tension in the Christian tradition between the idea that the saints are, on the one hand, those whose lives have been exceptional examples of faith to which we could never aspire, and, on the other hand, that the saints are ordinary people like you and me, and that we are, all of us, called to be saints.  But even this tension is lost if the caterpillars only ever stay home and watch Netflix: if we forget to even dream about becoming butterflies, about becoming saints.

Every schoolchild knows that a caterpillar spins itself a silken cocoon as it begins the process of metamorphosis – the transformation that will result in its emergence from the cocoon as a beautiful, winged butterfly.  You may not know that inside that cocoon, the caterpillar is dissolving its own tissue into a sort of soupy substance, from which its butterfly parts are formed.  And within that soupy substance are to be found “certain highly organized groups of cells known as imaginal discs.”  And from these imaginal discs are formed all the individual parts of a butterfly: legs, eyes, antennae, and, of course, its wings.[ii]  Imaginal discs – I think this is a wonderful term!

Every caterpillar is capable of this process - spinning, its silken cocoon and dissolving its old self…  except for the imaginal discs that begin the assembly of the newly transformed self into something the caterpillar may have forgotten she was always meant to become!

And if we have relegated the saints only to the realms of statuary, icon, and relic, then we are in danger of forgetting that every one of us is capable, too, of becoming something we may have forgotten we were always meant to become.  And so, on All Saints Day, aware of the tension that the saints are exemplary and unusual, but that, nevertheless, as the old hymn says, “I mean to be one too,” we gather not only to sing about the butterflies, so to speak, but also to look for our own imaginal discs in the soupy substance of the gathered church.  And the imaginal discs (whatever they are) hold the image of what we might become (like the statues in this place), and they also stir up our imaginations, by the power of the Spirit, to remember what it is we might become!

But have you forgotten, oh caterpillars, that God made you to be saints, to be butterflies?

Have you forgotten that metamorphosis is yours to claim, and that it started when you were baptized?

Have you become content with a wrinkled, scrunchy, lumpy, and inelegant life?  Have you given up hoping to fly, and acquiesced to a flightless life, as if wings are not yours to claim, and the colors are too costly for you to hope for?

Have you lost track of your imaginal discs?

So much of the world has been convinced that it is OK if the butterfly population is decimated; sad, but OK.  Because so much of the world has lost interest in ever becoming a saint, and is busy watching Netflix anyway.

But we hear St. John’s mystical accounting of the divine intention, as the one seated on the throne declares, “See I am making all things new!”

I am making all things new!

Are not we among the things that God makes new?  Has he not given us imaginal discs of untold wonder?

By God’s grace, part of life in the church is a kind of conversation with the saints, who stand before us, wings unfurled in all their glorious color.  And if on All Saints Day we hear them speaking to us, it might be that they are telling is that “the pay is actually about the same.”  But this is commentary more on who we are than on who they have become.  Because they know that our calling to sainthood is already written out in the imaginal discs that God has planted in us all.  They know that what we shall be is yet to be revealed, even when we doubt that there is anything left for us to become. 

The witness of the saints – ordinary and extraordinary, all – is to testify to what we are, all of us, called to become, both in this life and the next.  We are called to a transformed life of hope – metamorphosis - that emerges out of the wrinkled, scrunchy, inelegant lives we sometimes find ourselves living, flightless, day by day.

Or, if The New Yorker is subject to the criticism that its words or its drawings may not amount, per se, to the status of holy writ, then it might be because the cartoon gets this crucial bit wrong: that the pay is actually not about the same.  And if the promise of winged flight or heavenly reward ignites the imaginal discs in us, then so be it!  Oh, for the wings of a butterfly!

Come to think of it, the butterfly who is bringing third-quarter wage reports to an acquaintance caterpillar is probably one of the ones who went to business school, and perhaps we should consider his testimony with skepticism.

Let us, rather, reassure one another, my fellow caterpillars, that God made us to be more than we at first appear to be! 

God made caterpillars – every single one of them – to be changed into butterflies!

God gave us the saints, to show us that we might be saints too!

God made you what you are, not so that you could be wrinkled, scrunchy, inelegant, and flightless; God made you precisely the way you are – complete with imaginal discs – so that you might be transformed into someone more beautiful, more colorful, and less earthbound than you suspect you are.

There are a lot of us caterpillars out here in the world.  Pray, let us not forget what God made us to be, pray that he will

give us the wings of faith

to rise and see the saints,

and ask them whence their victory came,

and follow their incarnate God,

and see how great their joys,

how bright their glories be![iii]

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

All Saints Day 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] Field & Stream (fieldandstream.com), Feb 3, 2014, Phil Bourjaily, “Weather and Milkweed Shortage Lead to Monarch Butterfly Declines”

[ii] Scientific American (scientificamerican.com), Aug 10, 2012, Ferris Jabr, “How Does a Caterpillar Turn Into a Butterfly?”

[iii] Paraphrasing Isaac Watts, “Give us the wings of faith”