When Mystery Meets Material: and God showed up today.

So today was the day. Five years after beginning my journey toward the priesthood, 16 years after my first visit to an Anglican Church, I found myself in front of an expectant congregation with bread and wine in my hands. I must have seemed a little hesitant, wondering when someone else would come up and take over, when the real priest would step in and do the real part of the consecration. But no one did.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like, as I have, allow me to give you a little snapshot before it becomes normalized like so many other things which were once new and strange. It seemed to me that the miracle of the thing lay in the normalcy of it all. There, in front of me, sat normal wine and crackers, like those I have handled so many times. Behind the altar stood normal, human, me; no better or magical than any of the people I stood to serve. At the front of the church sat a very normal baby in the arms of his mother, just baptised; wandering to my right was a common one-year-old, oblivious to it all.

The mystery of the thing was that in the midst of all that, God showed up. You won’t find here an explanation of how that happened, because I don’t understand how God works anymore than you do. 

But what I DO know is that God chooses to show up and meet us using the common stuff of life. 

Using the normal lives of you and me. These are the things God has called “good,” and these are the places we find God again and again.

As I stretched my hands over the bread and the wine this morning, there was a keen sense of a gathered community there with me, meeting God. I was not alone, and neither was the congregation alone. Together we were meeting God in that place. The rest of the world, all that we were carrying as we came together that morning, seemed to fade away as we came together to encounter the Holy One in those precious moments together.

In my peripheral vision, I could see the faces of all humanity: there were white and black, Asian, Indigenous, old, young, poor, and rich. All these looked forward expectantly as we called upon the Holy One to meet us in that place. To call creation “good” once again as we gathered together in community modeling the communal nature of our Holy Trinity.

The honour in being chosen and allowed to preside at the Eucharist today was the privilege of retelling the story of our people. For many generations, before we could read or write, our story was told and retold by our ancestors. God’s faithfulness was remembered and retold by grandmothers and grandfathers who invited us, not to simply hear the story, but to become actors in its unfolding drama. 

The mystery of the Eucharist is that as we retell the story of old we are swept up into God’s continuing work among us.

And yet, for me the greatest honour was not standing there in front of everyone invoking  our God to join us there. My greatest joy came in the form of a tiny child looking up at me as he awaited a blessing. In the face of this child all the mysteries of our faith come together: God’s taking the form of a little child; Jesus’ pronouncement that the weak are strong and the last are first; the radical welcome of the Church which says all are welcome no matter what they have to offer.

In the eyes of a little child I see the joy and hope proclaimed in the Eucharist. I see there the faith that we so often struggle with as adults. And laying my hand on the little boy’s forehead, I glimpsed what God was talking about when God promised never to leave us. No, I cannot explain to you what happened today; but God met us there.

Creating Sacred Space

The term, “sacred space” gets thrown around a fair bit these days- but what does it really mean? People talk about the chapel at St. John’s as a place of peace, somewhere they can go to get away from the chaos of classes and assignments to rest, reconnecting with God and themselves. Though God is everywhere, this particular space is sacred because it has been set apart since its inception to be place for people to meet the Holy One, bringing before God all their fears, anxieties, joys, and hopes.

Space, I believe, carries a story in the same way that a person does. Our chapel carries the story of connecting students with the Holy One, becoming a home for the wanderer, the doubter, and the lonely. In this space, people have celebrated their greatest joys and mourned their greatest losses. They have confessed their fears and expressed their hopes.

A sacred space also has a special gift for ushering us toward the holy, often by focusing us on our senses rather than our clambering thoughts. A labyrinth, for example, stimulates the right brain to give our logic-driven, overworked left brain a rest. It is the creative centre that enables us to enter into mystery. Candles, incense, icons and art can play similar roles.

Creating sacred space, however, is not just about setting apart a physical location and designing it for entry into prayer. The creation of space also means silence and stillness, room to hear the story of the other, to ask questions, to listen. It means having the freedom to doubt, to be afraid and be honest about wherever we find ourselves on our pilgrimage toward God.

In Christian community, making space means having room to wrestle with the grey areas of faith and being okay to show up with more questions than answers. It means welcoming the gay student who is struggling with his identity, being ok with noisy children during the service, and making room for people to move in and out of the community as they need to, both supporting them and letting them go. As we attempt to create sacred space in the St. John’s chapel for both our Christian brothers and sisters and others, it is my prayer that the physical space would merely be a sign of the many ways in which space is created and welcomed in our community.

Questions and Answers

     This evening I had a conversation I will never forget. I was sitting beside a dear friend, ripe in years and equally ripe in wisdom, who asked about the funeral I officiated three days ago. “I don’t know” I responded quietly, “I just feel like the bible leaves me with more questions than answers.” As I sat there frustrated by the things I don’t understand, I waited quietly for his disappointment. I waited for him to tell me I’d make a terrible priest. Instead, his answer surprised me. “Maybe that’s why I like you” he said, more to himself than to me. “I have a lot of questions about the bible myself. When something terrible happens, there are no easy answers.”

     I couldn’t believe it. This man has been a devoted Christian all his life and holds the respect of many in his community. How could he have questions or, dare I say it, doubt? The answer, I realize, is that my friend has suffered a great deal on this earth. Christian or not, he isn’t naïve enough to pretend to have all the answers. Perhaps learning to follow Christ is more about learning to ask good questions than finding all the answers.

     Preaching at the funeral this week, I felt a little stupid, as if people were looking to me to give completed answers I couldn’t possibly provide. And I wasn’t about to pretend I could; I hate hypocrisy. Instead, I pointed them toward a mystery, something I knew was there though I didn’t understand it. I believe in things like the goodness of God, the coming kingdom, and the resurrection of the dead because I can feel them happening, not because I can explain what’s going on. Sometimes I don’t have a blessed clue.

     Watching for the signs of God’s kingdom is a bit like learning to sense the coming of a storm. When I was a kid growing up on the farm, I learned to sense the change in wind that signaled the need to close the barn right away.  I knew that when the animals began to act a little differently or the sky began to change, it was time to put away my toys and head inside. But to this day, I couldn’t tell you a thing about how the storm works. Or why we shut up the barn some days only the have the storm pass in another direction.

     Life in God is a similar mystery which can only be known by being experienced. Just as I can’t explain what it’s like to be playing in the field and suddenly sense that a storm is on the way, so it is very difficult to explain the mysteries of life and death in words. While I stood over the deceased this week with more questions than answers, however, God showed up. Later I was commended for a well-orchestrated funeral, but all I did was ask questions. I think that’s what they call faith- because faith only dies when we no longer wonder at the mystery, when we stop showing up, and when we stop asking questions.