The hospital all but clears out at 8pm on a Sunday night. Doors are locked. Lights go down. A hushed tone falls on everyone. Patients go from wanting visitors to wanting sleep; though sleep would be nice whenever they could get it. As the sun crawls against the sky, the chapel goes from a bright red hue (thanks to the stained glass) to a muted yellow provided only by lamps. Tonight, after a day of constant walking around, I felt the desire to go outside, to take notice of something beyond a room or a hall or a patient, and acknowledge God in the cyclical changes and patterns that we always see around us. It is the epitome of trying to avoid tunnel vision.
O gracious Light,
pure brightness of the everliving Father in heaven,
O Jesus Christ, holy and blessed!
Now as we come to the setting of the sun,
and our eyes behold the vesper light,
we sing your praises, O God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
You are worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices,
O Son of God, O Giver of life,
and to be glorified through all the worlds. –Phos hilaron
And in front of the hospital, I offered prayers for all inside.
At some point this week I decided that the best way to spend my 'down' moments during my on-call would be to polish the rosary I inherited from my grandfather. That moment appeared around 9pm, and as I sat down to polish, a few things struck me.
First, I haven't polished it since I received it, which struck me in the moment as a bit of negligence. I polished it with the same attention I used to give to cleaning weapons. Second, I then realized I was seeing it the same way my grandfather would have seen it when he received it possibly 50 years ago. Third, cleaning something makes you slow down and look carefully at the object. The rosary is all sterling silver, but there are several places where one can see where my grandfather made quick repairs with small rings of different metals. It was a well-used rosary by the time it got to me.
Polishing the rosary---the getting-ready-to-use--- then struck me as a deeper metaphor for my religious/spiritual journey. When one looks at my family one either sees Roman Catholicism or some form of the Baptist denominations. Religious histories seem to converge at me in the family tree. I am the one outlier (to my knowledge) being neither Catholic, nor Baptist. I'm taking the identity of the Episcopal Church, known as the via media or "middle way" between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. I was raised Baptist, and with that came a suspicion of almost all things Roman, even as half my family tree were faithful members of the Roman Catholic Church. The sentiment was muted yet definitely present in the Baptist Church in which I grew up.
My journey into the Episcopal Church could be seen retrospectively as an investigation of what in the Roman Catholic tradition seemed to be particularly meaningful to me. What had denominations like the Baptists thrown out to quickly or rebelled against with misplaced fervor? And yet, I know I'm not Roman Catholic either. I've been bandying around the idea that I may be Anglo-Catholic, but I'm not sure what that means in any objective sense (and there probably isn't an objective measure), nor do I know what it means personally. At the moment, the closest I can get to markers of my Anglican identity is that I'm a High-Church progressive with a blue-jeans mentality, trying to sift through Anglo-Catholic worship and theology for what seems true and feels authentic. This year in seminary will begin the harder work of forming an Anglican identity.
But, to get back to the rosary, part of being in a liturgical church is that I am connected to Christians over centuries by the prayers that they handed down to us. In like fashion, I am connected to my own family by taking up their prayers, such as the rosary. Now I just need to learn the prayers; the beads are ready and gleaming.
At some point this week I decided that the best way to spend my 'down' moments during my on-call would be to polish the rosary I inherited from my grandfather. That moment appeared around 9pm, and as I sat down to polish, a few things struck me.
First, I haven't polished it since I received it, which struck me in the moment as a bit of negligence. I polished it with the same attention I used to give to cleaning weapons. Second, I then realized I was seeing it the same way my grandfather would have seen it when he received it possibly 50 years ago. Third, cleaning something makes you slow down and look carefully at the object. The rosary is all sterling silver, but there are several places where one can see where my grandfather made quick repairs with small rings of different metals. It was a well-used rosary by the time it got to me.
Polishing the rosary---the getting-ready-to-use--- then struck me as a deeper metaphor for my religious/spiritual journey. When one looks at my family one either sees Roman Catholicism or some form of the Baptist denominations. Religious histories seem to converge at me in the family tree. I am the one outlier (to my knowledge) being neither Catholic, nor Baptist. I'm taking the identity of the Episcopal Church, known as the via media or "middle way" between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. I was raised Baptist, and with that came a suspicion of almost all things Roman, even as half my family tree were faithful members of the Roman Catholic Church. The sentiment was muted yet definitely present in the Baptist Church in which I grew up.
My journey into the Episcopal Church could be seen retrospectively as an investigation of what in the Roman Catholic tradition seemed to be particularly meaningful to me. What had denominations like the Baptists thrown out to quickly or rebelled against with misplaced fervor? And yet, I know I'm not Roman Catholic either. I've been bandying around the idea that I may be Anglo-Catholic, but I'm not sure what that means in any objective sense (and there probably isn't an objective measure), nor do I know what it means personally. At the moment, the closest I can get to markers of my Anglican identity is that I'm a High-Church progressive with a blue-jeans mentality, trying to sift through Anglo-Catholic worship and theology for what seems true and feels authentic. This year in seminary will begin the harder work of forming an Anglican identity.
But, to get back to the rosary, part of being in a liturgical church is that I am connected to Christians over centuries by the prayers that they handed down to us. In like fashion, I am connected to my own family by taking up their prayers, such as the rosary. Now I just need to learn the prayers; the beads are ready and gleaming.
