From time to time this year, a parishioner has asked me how the construction is going on the park next to our apartment. Most of the time, the answer has been, “Well, it’s really… not!” Not much gets done in the world of landscape construction when the ground is frozen. But now that it’s spring and work has started again, I’m reminded how much the work of a construction site can resemble the unfolding of our spiritual and emotional lives.

Sometimes the work is slow and unpredictable, as months pass by without any noticeable change. Sometimes it’s grating, even painful, as you’re awoken by the noise of a front-end loader dumping chunks of concrete into a dump truck at 6:45am. Sometimes it feels like a loss, as you watch a clawed behemoth rip shrubs from the dirt root and branch and listen to the sparrows who made their homes in them chirp forlornly from the wreckage. Sometimes it’s rather grim, as you look at your window for six months on what was once a beautiful green park and is now a heaping pile of dirt, wondering what they’re trying to do beneath the surface, what new plumbing is being installed in the trenches they must dig so early in the morning, before knocking off for the day at ten.

It’s a bit cheesy to write something for a church newsletter with the segue, “And isn’t it like this with God?” But—bear with me for a moment—isn’t it like this with God?

My spiritual life has never (never!) progressed in a straight line for more than a week or two. Sure, there are sometimes bursts of rich prayer in which I feel like I’m drawing closer to God, or times when I feel like I’m really on the right track, I’m really growing into a kinder or more loving or more compassionate person. But these moments are like the uneven activity in the park next door: brief flares of energy punctuating long periods of waiting.

And sometimes, in the more difficult and ultimately most fruitful parts of our lives, things can really be difficult. We can feel as though we’ve lost something we once had. We can feel as though the rich, green park that was once our prayer (or personality, or friendship) is now a vast expanse of dirt; as though something is being ripped up or stripped away, as if trenches are being dug in our souls and we don’t know when it will end, or how.

And yet in and through all this discomfort, real work is being done. It’s as true of spiritual growth as it is of construction that only superficial change can happen through small improvements to the surface. If you’re to really grow, God sometimes needs to rip up all the grass, dig some trenches through the dirt, and lay a few pipes to improve your drainage.

Faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) And while I hesitate to express faith in the ultimate competence of any municipal government, it’s fair to say that—in construction as in prayer—this is the only thing that will see you through: the assurance that what is being built will be worth it, that it will be even better than what was lost, that in God’s own time, you are being renewed and transformed into a more loving, more compassionate, more humble version of yourself—however many supply-chain issues and delays there may be along the way.

It’s become fashionable, in recent years, to mock those who respond to tragedy by offering their “thoughts and prayers”—and for good reason! In American public life we hear this phrase most often as a politician’s hollow response to an act of gun violence: “My thoughts and prayers are with the families.” (But my vote is with the NRA.) And of course, it’s resurfaced over the last few weeks as people around the world wonder what to do in response to the Russian attack on Ukraine and are left with nothing but their thoughts and prayers.

To the extent that this is fair, it’s fair as a critique of hypocrisy, not of prayer. The problem is not that politicians pray for an end to gun violence; it’s that politicians who hold the power to change public policy are hiding behind prayer, abusing the idea of prayer by wielding it as a shield against taking responsibility for the situation. (And in my more cynical moments, I’m inclined to wonder: How much time did you really spend on your knees grappling with God in prayer before your intern sent that tweet, Senator?)

But prayer itself is not inaction. It is, in fact, a powerful act.

Leave aside for a moment the common idea of prayer as a Christmas letter mailed to the North Pole, in which we submit to God a list of our anxieties and dreams in the hope that we can persuade God to give us what we want. Without delving too deeply into the metaphysical depths of Christian theology, let me just say: God is well aware that the war in Ukraine (or gun violence, or your nephew’s health, or …) is a problem. God isn’t tallying up the votes to see which way to act. By praying our hardest, we cannot evoke a supernatural military intervention from the heavens.

But prayer is not primarily our cry of anguish to God. It is the Spirit of God groaning wordlessly in the depths of our souls, and our spirits crying out in resonant response. Theologically speaking, our prayers can only ever begin as our response to the Holy Spirit’s presence and work within us. In prayer, we quiet our minds and our voices to listen for God’s voice within us. We lay down our own egos and allow ourselves to be shaped by God’s love. And then we return into the world, transformed into ever-so-slightly-more-Christ-shaped versions of ourselves, and we act. Prayer is a powerful act. Not a human act of oration, attempting to persuade God; but a divine act of love and a human response of listening and yielding to God’s will.

Sometimes we need to set aside a particular place and time to pray, and to pray together; a moment in which to set down our anxieties and our business and listen for God’s voice. As the great pastor Eugene Peterson wrote, “I can’t be busy and pray at the same time. I can be active and pray; I can work and pray; but I cannot be busy and pray. I cannot be inwardly rushed, distracted, or dispersed. In order to pray, I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me; more attention to God than to my clamoring ego. Usually, for that to happen there must be a deliberate withdrawal from the noise of the day, a disciplined detachment from the insatiable self.”

If you find yourself needing such a “deliberate withdrawal from the noise of the day” to pray these days—and especially to pray for peace, for the suffering of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers and Russian conscripts, and for the repentance of those who inflict such cruelty on their neighbors—I invite you to join us at a vigil of prayer for peace, to be held at St. John’s this Wednesday, March 30, at 7:00pm. It will be a short service, with time to quiet ourselves and listen to God; to lament the destruction and to pray for its end; and, perhaps most importantly, to allow ourselves to be transformed into people living lives of peace and love.

I hope to see you there. And if not: please join your prayers with ours, wherever and whenever you can.

If you were paying attention during the Eucharist on Sunday, or were here for Ash Wednesday, you probably noticed one striking difference from all the other Sunday Eucharists we’ve had here: I chanted (i.e., sang) the Collect of the Day and a large part of the Eucharistic Prayer! In keeping with the theme of my last few newsletter pieces (“Weird stuff in Lent and why we’re doing it”) I thought I’d say a bit today about chanted prayers: what they are, why we do them, and what they say about the very nature of prayer itself.

When I was meeting with some of our kids to learn about Communion on Sunday after the service, I told them that for almost everything in church, there’s a spiritual, churchy reason and a good, solid, practical reason. So, for example, the richly-decorated veil that covers the chalice until the priest sets the table for the Eucharistic Prayer symbolizes the glory and mystery of the Sacrament, whose inner nature is withheld from our sight until Christ reveals himself in the breaking of the bread; also, it keeps flies from getting into the wine. (And so on.)

Chanted prayers are common around the world: think of the muezzin’s call to prayer or the chanted Torah readings in a synagogue. They share a common and prosaic origin with our chanted Eucharistic prayers: in a world without microphones, it’s much easier to hear someone who’s singing than someone who’s speaking at a normal volume! In ancient and medieval Christian churches, large parts of the service would have been sung, with varying levels of complexity: from the Epistle sung in a simple monotone, to the elaborate chanted settings of various parts of the Mass. In the medieval Western European churches, in fact, the service essentially alternated between chanted prayers and virtually-inaudible prayers spoken or even whispered by the priest, standing and facing the altar with the people—which is to say, standing with his back to the people, making his words even harder to hear.

In a small space like ours, it’s easy to project and be heard. But sung prayers do change the sense of the service somehow. They can create a more solemn feeling, or a more festive one; the music colors the text and adds another layer of meaning and feeling. And more than anything, singing forces us to slow down, literally to focus on our breath and on our words. It’s easy to rush or stumble through a spoken prayer in distraction. It’s harder to rush through a chant, and—in fact—your body will warn you very quickly if you try to cram too much into a single breath! Modulating the speed of our prayer through this focus on breath can be one of the most spiritually-enriching changes to prayer; and I say “spiritually” quite intentionally, as the words “spiritual” and “Spirit” and “spirituality” all come from the Latin word spiritus, “breath.”

In a modern world of written words, many of us are used to thinking silently inside our heads. But the silence of our own minds can be an ironically-noisy place. Our silent thoughts and silent prayers can move at the speed of light, richocheting around the insides of our skulls and raising a whole cacophony of distractions and anxieties. It’s why it’s often so helpful to talk something out with a friend or therapist or priest; not because their advice or input is any good (it’s sometimes not), but because speaking out loud forces us to organize our thoughts into something more linear than silent thought often is. And because chant requires such attention to our breath, it forces us to slow down and organize ourselves even more, as the Spirit of God flows into our lungs and then out into our prayer.

So, anyway: if you hate the chanted Eucharistic prayer, don’t worry; like all things in liturgical life, this will rotate on and off. If you love it, take heart! And ask yourself (maybe out loud! maybe in song!) how it’s drawing you closer to God.

We’ll mark the beginning of the season of Lent this Sunday’s by beginning our service with what’s known as ‘The Great Litany,’ a long series of prayers and petitions with sung responses. While it was originally intended for use every Sunday morning (and on Wednesdays and Fridays!) in more recent times it’s mostly been used as a Lenten tradition, either on the Sundays in Lent, or on the first Sunday in Lent, or simply not at all! Douglas tells me it hasn’t been sung at St. John’s since time immemorial, so I thought I’d take the chance to write a few words about the Litany today.

A ”litany” is simply a kind of prayer in which a leader reads (or a cantor sings) a number of petitions, to which the people give a repeating response. If you’re not familiar with the Great Litany, you’ll probably recognize litanies in general as one of the fairly common forms for the Prayers of the People, for example Form I:

With all our heart and with all our mind, let us pray to the Lord, saying “Lord, have mercy.”

For the peace of the world, for the welfare of the Holy Church of God, and for the unity of all peoples, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord, have mercy.

For our Bishop, and for all the clergy and people, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord, have mercy.

“The Litany” with a capital “L” was among the very first services used in English, rather than in Latin, during the earliest days of the reformation of the Church of England (first published in 1544, it predates even the first Book of Common Prayer!), and it became a cornerstone of Anglican liturgy. A typical Sunday’s services would consist of Morning Prayer, the Litany, and the Liturgy of the Word from the service of Holy Communion (although usually not actually communion, for reasons I may write about another time!), followed by a break for lunch, followed by catechesis for the children and a service of Evening Prayer in the late afternoon. As the patience of both clergy and parishioners wore thin over the years, the service was typically streamlined—especially in the wild world of the Americas!—such that a typical Sunday morning became merely Morning Prayer, or later simply the Eucharist, and the Litany dropped out of regular use.

The Litany, you may noticed on Sunday, is something of an odd duck. Its theology is not always entirely in line with the rest of our liturgies, or indeed with some of our own personal beliefs! You may notice an emphasis on wickedness and punishment that seems downright medieval, and indeed it is, reflecting as it does a particular moment in the transition between medieval, reformed, and modern theology. It only takes one hearing of some of the petitions to understand why it’s often relegated to Lent, and to one Sunday at that (e.g., “From all evil and wickedness; from sin; from the crafts and assaults of the devil; and from everlasting damnation, / Good Lord, deliver us”; “From all false doctrine, heresy, and schism; from hardness of heart, and contempt of thy Word and commandment, / Good Lord, deliver us,” et al).

But there’s a power in the Litany, at least for me, at least this year. While its structure and verbiage have been tweaked somewhat over the generations, it still fundamentally captures the concerns of people praying five hundred years ago. And while their theology or worldview may be somewhat different from yours, their fears and anxieties are not.

We live in a time of climate change and global pandemic, and we pray with our siblings in Christ across five centuries: “From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine, / Good Lord, deliver us.”

We watch in horror as Putin’s Russia reenacts the foreign policy of Hitler’s Germany, wreaking havoc on dense urban areas with missiles and rocket artillery, and we pray with ancestors long gone who lived through the Blitz: “From all oppression, conspiracy, and rebellion; from violence, battle, and murder; and from dying suddenly and  unprepared, / Good Lord, deliver us.”

We pray for faithful church leaders, and just politicians; for the homeless and the hungry, for women in childbirth and for children; for the lonely, and the suffering, and the departed, and for all the world.

And as strive to keep our balance amidst the storms of this world, we cry out to God, “That it may please thee to strengthen such as do stand; to comfort and help the weak-hearted; to raise up those who fall; and finally to beat down Satan under our feet, / We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.”

(Whatever you think of Satan, that’s undoubtedly one of the baddest lines in the history of prayer.)

If the years 2020, 2021, and 2022 have taught me anything, it’s that the distance between our lives and those of the past is fairly small. Medicine and technology and the United Nations have made incredible strides in improving the wellbeing of human beings as a whole; yet we live, as we have always lived, in a world that is full of suffering, disaster, war, and pain. Which is, of course, the same world in which we have always lived, a world that is full of love, compassion, and courage; a world that is full of the presence of God.

This Sunday after church, we’ll carry out two of my favorite pre-Lenten traditions: burying our Alleluias and burning palms to make ashes for Ash Wednesday. Neither is strictly necessary, or even officially recommended. But both are very fun.

You probably know that we banish the word “Alleluia” (or its older Hebrew form, “Hallelujah!”) from our liturgy and music during the season of Lent. The word simply means, “Praise the Lord!” and we do, indeed, continue praising God during Lent. The omission of the word “Alleluia” marks Lent as a more somber and reflective season, one in which the focus shifts slightly toward mourning our imperfections rather than praising God’s glory. And indeed, it’s balanced during the season of Easter with extra Alleluias, not only in our hymns but in the liturgy itself, with extra Alleluias added to the dismissal at the end of every service.

It’s sad to see our Alleluias go. As one medieval bishop wrote, “We part from the ‘Alleluia’ as from a beloved friend.” So, since the medieval period, people have said “goodbye” to “Alleluia” in a variety of ways. This year, as we did last year, our children will decorate Alleluia banners, which we’ll bless and then carry in procession to be buried in the garden (or in a snowbank, as the case may be…) On Palm Sunday, we’ll “resurrect” our Alleluias again, transforming them into something new with which to celebrate Easter.

The ashes with which we mark Ash Wednesday, too, are the result of a transformation. The ashes are made from burned palm branches, mixed with holy oil. As with most things in church tradition, this has a practical and a symbolic purpose. The holy oil is the same holy oil used in baptism. In baptism, it symbolizes the seal of the Holy Spirit, anointing the newly-baptized as a joint-heir with Christ, the Anointed One. So on Ash Wednesday, the mixture of ashes and oil symbolizes our state as human beings: physical and yet spiritual; mortal and yet promised immortality; creatures dust, who will return to dust, and yet the holy and anointed ones of God. And, on a practical level, a little oil helps the ashes stick to your face.

The ashes could be any ashes. On the practical level, burning last year’s palms is just a way to save some money and, hey, dried-up old palm leaves will burn better than fresh ones. But for the ashes to be the burned remains of last year’s palms also creates a set of powerful symbolic links. We waved these branches last year while singing “All glory, laud, and honor to thee, Redeemer, King!” and greeting our Messiah with cries of “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” They symbolize the hopes we have for deliverance; the hopes our spiritual ancestors had for independence, two thousand years ago.

And now, another year has passed. Our hopes and dreams for earthly salvation, for a king who’d ride into our city and fix our world, have not come true quite yet. The palm branches of our hoped-for royal procession have become the ashes of our own mortality.

It’s an ambivalent scene: festive and solemn, disappointing and fun. But I can’t help but notice that the bowl in which we’ll burn our hopes into ashes is the one in which we’ll light the New Fire at our Easter Vigil: that the oil with which we hoped to anoint a Savior now anoints our foreheads, too.

And the cycle of tradition continues: from the Alleluia-less Lent to the double-Alleluia Easter and back again; from palms to ashes, from dust to dust, from fire to fire again and again and again, reenacting the mystery of our salvation in every season of our lives.