People are always looking for good news, for the heart-warming fluff that appears all too rarely in the media these days. So here’s a dose of joy this week: At this year’s Harvest Fair, we accidentally created the world’s kindest system of restaurant reviews.

Over the last couple of post-pandemic years, we’ve had to remember how to serve a Turkey Dinner to so many people at once, and we’ve been refining the process over time. This year, we filled out an order slip for each diner at the door listing exactly what each person was ordering. Our servers brought them back to the kitchen, where plates could be made up, and then sent back out to the diners. Overall, it worked pretty well!

There was just one unintended hitch. On the order slip, we had fields like “Turkey — White / Dark,” “Sides — don’t give me… Potatoes / Stuffing / Gravy,” and “Pie — No Pie / Pie / Pie a la Mode.” And then, at the bottom, the simply-labeled: “Notes,” with a few blank lines. This was, I suppose, intended for things like “Extra gravy!” and so on, any additional random notes that we wanted to the kitchen from the front.

But when people received their meals, the order slips came back. And so what we received, by way of “Notes,” was not “Extra gravy!” or “Please don’t let the cranberry touch the stuffing.”

It was, in fact, the world’s kindest system of restaurant reviews. What was intended for us to write notes about people’s orders became a way for them to write something back to us. Here’s some of what they said:

• “Nate was an efficient, attentive, and friendly server. Otto was a delightful host—fun and responsible. Turkey—moist, everything yummy! Tx.”
• “Food was delicious, especially the apple pie. Most notably, the service was incredibly attentive. The whole experience was delightful.”
• “What a treat! Thank you so much for the fast and attentive table service. You all did a wonderful job!”
• “Lovely atmosphere with great food and service.”
• “A splendid meal served by an exceptional crew.”
• “5 star service. The food was amazing. You did an awesome job. Keep up the good work. Thank you and God Bless.”
• “Great food thank you!!!” (this was from one of the aforementioned servers, to the kitchen!)
• “Very fast service and food tasted amazing” (okay, this was also from one of the servers…)

Okay, some of these were patting ourselves on the back. (I’m pretty sure one Vestry member wrote “I will come back!”) But for the most part, I didn’t recognize the names. These were the honest and heartfelt thoughts of our neighbors, given the opportunity to say something. I think the only criticism I read, while leafing through, was “I could have used less mashed potatoes on my plate,” to which I can only say—No, dear neighbor; there is no such thing as too many mashed potatoes on your plate. (Only too little gravy.)

What an contrast to the endless piles of slop we wade through reading Internet reviews, to the well-known bifurcation into the 5-star “This worked great and did exactly what it said” reviews and the 1-star “THIS WAS TRASH!!!” Our social media websites have become consumed with rage-bait and with lies. Our TVs turned on the “breaking-news” chyrons years ago, and never turned them off. The online comments sections of newspapers are so depraved that “never read the comments” has become a truth universally acknowledged.

But the Harvest Fair notes? Pure, unalloyed, gratitude.

I don’t think that’s a mistake. The way we treat one another, in real communities, face to face, is just different from the way we behave online, obscured from one another by usernames or keyboards, shades of meaning stripped away by being transcribed to text. I’m willing to acknowledge the irony of writing this to you in an email newsletter, and I know that many of you read this from far afield. But I also know it to be true that as online communications becomes more and more widespread, our face-to-face, embodied communities become more important than they have ever been.

I’m incredibly grateful to all of you who made a delightful community event like the Harvest Fair possible, but more than that: I’m incredibly grateful for all of you who make a delightful community like ours possible at all.

Swimming and I are only fair-weather friends. And to be fair… it isn’t swimming’s fault.

Many of you know that I’m an avid runner. If you head out to the boardwalk along the Mystic behind the Schrafft’s building on a weekday morning, in any weather and at any time of year, you’ll probably bump into me there.

Swimming gets about three weeks a year, when I’m a hundred yards from salt water that’s calm and warm, and that’s pretty much that. But when it’s swimming season for me, I’ll be out there every day.

This kind of exercise pattern has some strange effects. In a way, it’s not so different from prayer.

The first few days of swimming every day, I am elated. It’s new and refreshing and I’ve been looking forward to it for months.

The next few days, I’m sore. I go to bed with my arms and shoulders tired, and I wake up feeling stiff. The last thing I want to do is to go for a swim. (Ironically, the best way to loosen up the muscles and start feeling better… is to go for a swim!)

By the second week, I’m not sore every day, but I’m tired. Really tired, but in the good way—The way that says, “I used my muscles today,” not the way that says, “I didn’t sleep enough last night.” But still, tired, and the motivation begins to flag. The novelty has worn off, and it’s become a new routine. Maybe I swim a bit less, or take a day off because it’s cloudy. But I feel more or less okay.

By the third week, I’m back to normal, but different. I feel the same as I did a month ago. Not excited to be swimming, not elated. Not sore, and not exhausted. I’m just my baseline self. Except… There are muscles that I haven’t had all year, arm and shoulder muscles that don’t come from running or preaching or sitting on the couch, physical changes that I can actually feel. I am the same, but different.

Spiritual exercise sometimes works in much the same way.

Perhaps you begin to take on some new spiritual practice. You’re going to meditate for twenty minutes each day. You’re going to read the Bible three times a week. You’re going to write down five things you’re grateful for in a journal before bed each day.

Initially, you might be excited by the new adventure, elated by finally finding a way to become more grounded and more centered.

After a few days, the excitement wears off. It’s hard to sit in silence for so long. There’s weird stuff in that Bible on the shelf. Who’s really grateful for that many things each day? You’re sore!

And soon enough, you’re tired. What was once a new and exciting spiritual practice has become a routine. The Spirit feels less present. Your spirit is drained. You begin to skip a day, or a week, and then come back. You do your best to settle into a routine, but you no longer feel the deep spiritual satisfaction of the early days.

And yet you might find that you are changed. You have new spiritual strength, new muscles of calm or gratitude or love, that you did not have before. You may feel the same, but you are not the same. You just need to know where to look to see what’s different.

It’s incredibly common to give up instead, to ditch some new spiritual practice during the second or third phase (the soreness or the boredom), or even to look back from the fourth stage toward  the first and wish we still felt that first wave of joy. It’s normal to go through cycles of excitement, to dive into something and then step back.

But if your spiritual life is beginning to feel routine, it’s might not be that you’ve failed. It might be that you’ve succeeded. A sense of routine in prayer doesn’t have to be a sign that there’s something wrong. Prayer isn’t like going to a rock concert—it doesn’t always need to come with a sense of awe. Prayer is more like swimming: if it’s no longer an exciting challenge, but just part of the rhythm of the day, it just might be a sign that you’re doing it well.

When I think about Lent, I’m often reminded of the instructions that one of my mentors as a priest gave to the Flower Guild at the first church I served, where she was the interim rector at the time. They had asked her whether she had guidance for flowers during Lent. She answered that many churches didn’t have flowers during Lent at all, and they were shocked. They had always had flowers in Lent before… So she came up with a compromise proposal: Flowers would be fine, but they should try for an aesthetic she summed in a phrase that’s stuck with me: Lent was, she said, a season for “desert beauty.”

The Flower Guild pondered this at their monthly meeting, put their heads together, and came up with a stunning idea: on each side of the altar, they placed a single, pale purple orchid, in an undecorated pot, and they carefully tended each flower through the whole season of Lent.

On Tuesday, I sat in a clergy meeting as priests and deacons shared their Lenten practices of giving things up and taking them on. The final priest to share, who serves a parish downtown, offered her favorite part of Lent: at the end of each day, she writes down the most beautiful thing she saw that day. For her, every day of Lent is punctuated, as she walks through the crowded streets of Back Bay and the barren trees of the Public Garden, with the question: “Is this the most beautiful thing I’ll see today? What about this?”

The forty days of Lent reflect the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness, in fasting and prayer, facing temptation. We journey through these forty days, too, facing our own small temptations, praying our own avid prayers. Perhaps we learn something about ourselves. Perhaps we grow closer to God. But in this muddy season of Lent, in this long, grey season of Lent, in this taxing, chocolate-free (coffee-free, wine-free) season of Lent—whatever it may be for you—it can be hard to see the beauty.

And yet.

There is a “desert beauty” in life stripped down to its essentials, a beauty revealed when a few luxuries are given up or a new commitment to pay attention is made. It’s the beauty of your life, as it is, without the distractions. It’s the beauty people are seeking when they go out to the wilderness, the beauty you can sometimes find when you’re left alone with God, and the world becomes quiet enough for you to hear the voice of God speaking to you: “This is my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.”

Because you are (God’s beloved child.) And God is (well pleased with you.) And wherever these forty days of Lent take you, however muddy or beautiful, however loud or quiet it may be, the Holy Spirit is there with you, inviting you always to search for and to tend to and to rejoice in the small, beautiful things of the world.

On January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany marked the conclusion of the Twelve Days of Christmas. “Epiphany,” derived from the Greek word Epiphaneia, or “Manifestation,” celebrates “the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles,” the moment in which God’s love was revealed to all the nations of the world. Eastern celebrations of the day remember three kinds of epiphanies: the arrival of the Magi (the “Three Kings”) at Bethlehem; the Baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan; and Jesus’ first miracle, transforming water into wine at Cana. These mysterious epiphanies reveal God’s love and Christ’s power to the world. We sing “We Three Kings” and we eat king cakes and we bless chalk to bless our homes.

And then we find ourselves in “the season after the Epiphany,” a phrase I’ve always loved. It’s the season in which all of us church people live our lives. Presumably, if you’re part of a church like this in a city like this in 2023, it’s not by accident. It’s not because it’s convenient, or because it’s expected. Presumably you’ve had some kind of “epiphany” or your own, along the way. Something’s happened in your life to reveal God’s love for you.

But now you’re in the season after the Epiphany, in one of those in-between times, living ordinary life and trying to muddle through. And it’s in these seasons, not during the big holidays, that we really see what it means to live a life of faith. What does it mean to remember the warm candlelight of Christmas Eve in the grey slush of January? What difference does it make to have heard the herald angels sing when their voices are long faded from the sky? What’s life like in the long season after the Epiphany, while you wait for the next big thing to arrive?

O God, by the leading of a star you manifested your only Son to the peoples of the earth: Lead us, who know you now by faith, to your presence, where we may see your glory face to face; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

When the parties are all over and the presents all unwrapped, Christmas remains. When the family trips are over and the kids are (finally) back in school, Christmas is still here. The City of Boston is happy to pick my Christmas tree up for composting on the January 3 but that’s only the Tenth Day of Christmas, and my tree is here to stay. (Although that part’s more procrastination than piety.)

I say all this not just as an old-fashioned and curmudgeonly comment about celebrating the full Twelve Days of Christmas, but because, to me, the disconnect between the hubbub of the holiday schedule and the quiet of this first week of January comes as a huge relief.

Our cultural Christmas begins in late November and peaks on Christmas Eve, with holiday parties and Christmas Spectaculars and NORAD’s annual Santa Tracker. But when the rush of activity dies down, the Church’s celebration is just beginning. And it extends far beyond those Twelve Days.

This week, the baby Jesus has only just been given his name, on Monday. The baby’s still half-asleep, his parents still figuring out how to raise their newborn child. This week, the Magi are still en route, with royal and unnerving gifts: gold for a king, frankincense for a god, the myrrh that perfumes bodies in the tomb. The days of Jesus’ ministry are far off; even the day when the precocious child wanders away to sit in the Temple won’t come until he’s twelve, an age unimaginable to his parents now. In forty days, they’ll go to the Temple for the first time, to present Jesus there: for now, they’re praying he’ll stay “tender and mild” for long enough for them to get some sleep.

The choirs of angels have faded from the sky. The shepherds have been called back to their fields. All the quiet, plain activities of life have started up. And yet Jesus remains, and Christmas remains, and the tidings of his birth remain good news—now that it’s quiet enough for us to hear them, maybe even better news than before—“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:10-11)