As a relatively young and technologically-adept person, I often find myself fielding impromptu requests for tech support from family, friends, and coworkers. As Douglas and I sat in the office on Tuesday trying to fix his phone, I realized that my quick fixes fall into four categories:

1. “It’s not plugged in.”
2. “Turn it off and turn it on again.”
3. “You’re doing something wrong. Here’s a better way.”
4. “I think you need some professional help.”

It turns out these apply to the rest of life, as well. So:

Are you plugged in? Are you eating, sleeping, getting out of the house? Are you connected to other people and to God? Are you meeting the basic needs that give you energy in life? Or are you running on a battery that’s quickly draining away? In Christian spirituality, we sometimes call this a rule of life: a pattern of work, and community, and prayer that’s sustainable over the long term. Do you have a rule of life, implicitly or explicitly? Are you following it? What needs to change for you to be connected to your power source?

Have you tried turning it off and on again? Sometimes you need a complete reset. Something’s gone haywire. You can’t get from Point A to Point B by a series of gradual steps; you need to shut everything down and start it back up again. The Bible calls this Sabbath, a kind of weekly power cycle where you turn off all the activity and the anxiety and the worries of the world and spend time with family and God. Whether it’s rest from work or space in a relationship or that walk outside that refocuses you and brings you new insight into a problem: Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Is there a better way to achieve what you’re trying to achieve? Many of us have parts of our lives that consist mostly of banging our heads against the walls (usually metaphorically.) We’ve fallen into rut. We try the same thing again and again and again and wonder why it doesn’t work. “That link,” we think, “should simply copy and paste!” But it’s not so simple, because engineers (no offense) don’t always think quite the same way you do. Sometimes the truth is counter-intuitive. This is actually one of the reasons we spend so much time in church reading the Bible: not because it confirms what we already believe and do but because it’s so often surprising and counter-intuitive, at least in our culture. Sometimes it helps to have another perspective that comes from far outside our own place and time, to lead us to ask, “Is there a better way?”[1]

Do you need to ask for help? Sometimes, the most important thing a friend can do to help you is to tell you that he can’t help you. Maybe you need the Genius Bar or the phone manufacturer. Maybe you need a doctor or a therapist. Maybe it’s even simpler than that. Maybe you’ve been so convinced that you need to be independent and strong that you can’t even ask a friend for help. But this is why we have community: so we have others to whom we can turn in times of need. There’s no shame in needing others’ help or support, when you need it. There’s no shame in recognizing your own limits, when more or different help is needed, beyond what you can provide.

[1] As C.S. Lewis beautifully makes the case for reading old books: “Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.” (In hisintroduction to a translation of St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation published in 1944.)

This coming Tuesday is the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, one of the best-known and most-loved of the church’s myriad medieval saints. St. Francis is best known for two things: his commitment to strict poverty in the service of the gospel, and his distinctive recognition of non-human animals as creatures of God whose lives are no less worship-filled than ours.

Francis is famous for preaching to the birds. I find it more interesting to hear of him praying with them:

…When he was walking with a certain Brother through the Venetian marshes, he chanced on a great host of birds that were sitting and singing among the bushes. Seeing them, he said unto his companion: “Our sisters the birds are praising their Creator, let us too go among them and sing unto the Lord praises and the canonical Hours.”

The Life of St. Francis, by St. Bonaventure.

The same goes for the cicadas, whose voices once inspired blessed Francis to prayer:

At Saint Mary of the Little Portion, hard by the cell of the man of God, a cicada sat on a fig-tree and chirped; and right often by her song she stirred up unto the divine praises the servant of the Lord, who had learnt to marvel at the glorious handiwork of the Creator even as seen in little things. One day he called her, and she, as though divinely taught, lighted upon his hand. When he said unto her: “Sing, my sister cicada, and praise the Lord thy Creator with thy glad lay,” she obeyed forthwith, and began to chirp, nor did she cease until, at the Father’s bidding, she flew back unto her own place.

This Sunday we’ll once more hold our annual-but-for-Covid “Blessing of the Animals” (Sunday, October 2 at 12pm at the Training Field in Charlestown), a short service of prayer and blessing for animals and the humans who love them, usually timed around St. Francis day in his honor. It’s a beautiful service recognizing and honoring the bonds of love between people and pets; I invite you to bring yours!

But if you, like me, don’t have a pet—if you, like me, are in fact quite allergic to most of the cuddliest household animals, and were left with the limited affections of two short-lived hamsters and two easily-started turtles during your childhood—St. Francis’s example is perhaps even more relevant. It was in the song of nature, after all, that Francis heard creation’s prayer to God. It was not only in the bark of a beloved dog or the meow of a contented cat that Francis heard an animal’s love for its human. It was in the songs of the birds and the bugs that he heard their love for God, and was himself inspired to sing God’s praise.

“Of all the saints,” writes our official hagiography, “Francis is perhaps the most popular and admired but probably the least imitated; few have attained to his total identification with the poverty and suffering of Christ.” Fair enough; we are often more enamored with the idea of Francis than with the actual, difficult life of Francis. But while we may not imitate his poverty, we can at least imitate his inspiration. We can allow ourselves to be inspired by the voices of the creatures all around us. We can listen to the sweet hymns of the birds. We can let cicadas lead us into song, and thank God for the gift of this beautiful creation.

“After every royal wedding,” wrote one Episcopal priest friend online, “I get a spate of requests from brides-to-be: ‘Can I have a ceremony just like _____?’ I wonder if the same will happen after the Queen’s funeral: ‘Can my mother’s service be just like the Queen’s?’”

And the answer, remarkably, is: Yes. (Sort of.)

It’s one of the most powerful things about the Prayer Book tradition. No, your casket probably won’t be escorted into the church by an array of highly-trained and colorful soldiers. No, the prayers probably won’t be read by the heads of every Christian tradition in the country. No, the queue at your visitation probably won’t be ten miles long.

But yes: the dignity and the majesty and the beauty of that service can be yours. The power of the Prayer Book tradition is that while the ritual and the decoration and the music may vary, the heart of the liturgy remains the same. Those words—from “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord…” to everything that follows—have been said innumerable times. They have been said for kings and queens, laid to rest surrounded by hundreds of dignitaries. They have been said in nearly-empty churches, for unknown neighbors found frozen on the street. They have been said in small churches and large ones, in the heart of the city and the middle of nowhere, for millions and millions of ordinary people who lived millions and millions of ordinary lives: striving, imperfect, loving, beloved.

For me, the most powerful moment of the day was the simple commendation, spoken by the Archbishop of Canterbury: “Heavenly Father, King of kings, Lord and giver of life… we entrust the soul of Elizabeth, our sister here departed, to thy merciful keeping, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life…”

“We” is not the royal we. It does not mean the bishop. It doesn’t mean the royal family. It doesn’t even mean the people of England, or of the United Kingdom. It means “we,” the Church, the family of God, entrust the soul of Elizabeth, our sister, to God. In Christ there is no title or rank but “sister,” no king or queen but the “King of kings.” In Christ, all human hierarchies dissolve: we are simply siblings in one family of God, and while the rituals we attach to the liturgy reflect our stature in this world, God makes no distinctions among us. “We brought nothing into this world,” as the funeral service says, “and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” We leave behind everything we have and everyone we know, journeying deeper into the love of God:

changed from glory into glory
            till in heaven we take our place,
till we cast our crowns before thee,
            lost in wonder, love, and praise!

So “Go forth, O Christian soul, from this world.” May her soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, by the mercy of God, rest in peace.