Read Bede’s Blog, Get More Accomplished

From the New York Times:

…according to new research out of the University of Melbourne… Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) improves productivity by giving internet-centric workers a chance to refocus their minds between tasks. The increase is startling; workers who spend as much as 20 percent of their office time leisure browsing actually get more work done than workers who don’t.

$449.54

That’s how much our Sunday School kids raised via our Pennies For Peace drive during this season of Lent. All those coins really added up (and weighed about 150 pounds).

Thanks to everyone for all their donations and help with the drive. A check will go out tomorrow to the Central Asia Institute to aid their work building and maintaining schools in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan.

To read past Bede’s Blog posts on the Pennies For Peace drive, click here.

Sermon: Living the Drama of Holy Week

In our spiritual lives we oscillate between times for withdrawal and reflection–in which we re-align ourselves with our deepest values–and times of action–in which we re-engage as agents of those values, living our values in the everyday world. The ritual observance of Holy Week, in Jerusalem, around the world, and here at St. Bede’s, is meant to provide a spiritual landscape for our own traveling, complete with the iconography of narrative landmarks, moving us through the drama as a means of spiritual transport.

We are part of the crowd in the story. We are part of both the processions, into the holy city and then out again to Golgotha. In a kaleidoscope of felt response, we identify with bystanders, conspirators, disciples, and authorities, at once or in turn. In our traveling, we enter and depart from the scenes at will. We experience the public arena, then and now, in our comings and goings…

Having traveled far with the story of Jesus, we are transported by it, and we no longer see things as we did before we entered it… Being engaged by the story and person of Jesus, we are no longer free to disregard its implications, its consequences, its truth, its power. We are left holding the bag, as Judas Iscariot, and the cross, as Simon of Cyrene. We are left with the nagging awareness of our multiple evasions and denials, like Simon Peter…

The sweep of the Holy Week story reminds me of the hippie slogan from the sixties. What if they gave a war and nobody came? In this story, the slogan would run something like this: What if they made an empire and nobody saluted? What if they made a religion and nobody groveled? What if someone exposed the imperfections of our structures and we saw through them, into the heart of life itself? What if somebody gave an arena of redemption and everybody came?

[Click below to read the complete sermon.]

A Poem For Holy Week

The Rabbit

Scatterghost,
it can’t float away.
And the rain, everybody’s brother,
won’t help. And the wind all these days
flying like ten crazy sisters everywhere
can’t seem to do a thing. No one but me,
and my hands like fire,
to lift him to a last burrow. I wait
days, while the body opens and begins
to boil. I remember
the leaping in the moonlight, and can’t touch it,
wanting it miraculously to heal
and spring up
joyful. But finally
I do. And the day after I’ve shoveled
the earth over, in a field nearby
I find a small bird’s nest lined pale
and silvery and the chicks—
are you listening, death?—warm in the rabbit’s fur.

- Mary Oliver

The Rector Remembers: “Our Wild Lunacy”

Kids grow up with Easter memories of bunnies and chickies and multicolored eggs. I remember how desperately I wanted the bright, baby chicks, careening around in the cardboard box, outside the dime store.

My mother looked distressed and told us that the dye was bad for them, that it would make them sick and that they would probably die. I was stricken.

I also remember standing in carpet grass, sticking my fingers, as far as they would go, into the metal cages to feed the soft, warm, rounded bunnies lettuce leaves and carrots. We were strictly cautioned to leave the latches alone, to keep them safe from the neighborhood dogs. And I remember the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach wondering which of my dog friends would be so bloodthirsty.

Another memory from the last weeks of Lent was blowing eggs. We’d prick holes in each of them and blow the goopy contents into bowls. We had to eat scrambled eggs and custard for a couple of weeks. After the intact shells dried, we filled them with confetti, glued tissue over the holes, painted the outsides, and had a pile of cascarones for the Easter party. What a gleeful mess, cracking them on the heads of party goers at the egg hunt!

Mary Oliver’s poem, The Rabbit, brings it all back vividly. With words, she paints a kaleidoscope of memory, a leafy view in dappled light. We behold the hush of death in the woods, the famished peepings of new life, throbbing in the nest. The rabbit donates its fur in death, to become a luxuriant duvet for newborn chicks.

Womb and tomb, cradle and grave, are linked in an embrace, the cycle of life in its dramatic dance. My favorite line is, “I remember the leaping in the moonlight, the wild lunacy that celebrates one’s place in the whole of things.”

Easter is our wild lunacy. Are you listening, death? You are always life’s handmaid. Enjoy your paschal revelry. For it is the Lord of the Dance, Christ risen and leaping in the dawn light, who makes our hearts leap along for joy.

Alleluia!

- The Rev. Kitty Lehman, April, 2009