Category Archives: Parish News

Welcoming “Turn It Around” to St. John’s

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In our first reading this coming Sunday, the prophet Jeremiah exhorts the people: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” (Jer. 29:7) Like those ancient Israelites, we are a small congregation gathered in a large city. And like them, we try to make the place we live a better place, in big ways and in small ones.

That’s why I’m so pleased to welcome the new “Turn It Around, Jr.” youth group to our building, where they’ll be meeting on Monday evenings beginning this week.

Turn It Around began as a high-school youth group ten years ago. The program, started by the Charlestown Coalition, “aims to educate and empower Charlestown’s youth to find their passions and reach their full potential – using community service, art, sports, civic engagement, social justice, poetry, music, film, theatre, and even the outdoors as vehicles for engagement and discovery.” Turn It Around participants are almost entirely Charlestown residents, and many of them are Charlestown High School students. The program offers employment, academic support, and a caring and consistent adult presence in these young people’s lives.

The program is so popular that they constantly receive requests for participation by younger and younger students, so many that they’ve finally been able to launch a “Turn It Around, Jr.” for middle schoolers led by Charlestown native and TIA alumna Zaire Richardson.

You can learn more about Turn It Around and the Coalition’s amazing impact on our neighborhood in the 30-minute documentary they produced to celebrate their 10th anniversary. (Click on the video below.)

I hope you can find some way to support their work — by participating in the monthly Tuesday-evening Race & Equity dialogues they organized with some of our local leaders, by volunteering to support their work, or just by offering a friendly welcome if you see them in and around our building on Monday nights.

St. Francis and the Animals

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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.

“Go forth, O Christian soul”

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“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.

Labor and Rest

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On Labor Day, we celebrate two things that are dear to Christian theology: work and rest. We recognize that we are the creative creatures of a creative Creator, a God who shapes and forms us like a potter (that’s Jeremiah, this Sunday!) and who made us in his image so we, too, could create. We recognize that at times, there is nothing more satisfying than making something real and tangible, and that this can be done in many ways and in many stages of life. The child’s wobbly tower, the carpenter’s perfect joint, the crocheter’s new knot, the baker’s warm bread—in every one of these, we transform the world around us into something new, and we see that it is good. And it is! Work is good.

But work is easy to turn into an idol. Management has been measuring labor’s productivity for centuries, since the early days of crop-picking quotas and early-factory piecework, if not before then. But the digital age has only increased the pressure. And the rise of remote work has meant that the precise quantifications once reserved for assembly lines and Amazon warehouses are now being applied to white-collar workers, even to therapists and hospice chaplains, with equally-brutal results. (If you haven’t seen it, check out “The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score” in the New York Times.)

If we say that meaningful, creative work is a good thing in the Christian view, we have to acknowledge that rest is at least as good. Rest and work are, and always have been, interconnected: God spends six days creating the universe, and on the seventh day, he finishes the work and rests from all the work that she had done, and commands us to do the same. And yet it’s tempting to ignore that invitation to rest. The fruits of constant, productive labor are easy to measure and quantify. You can see them right in front of you. The benefits of rest are less tangible, but no less important.

There’s a delightful irony to Labor Day weekend: we celebrate labor by taking an extra day off work! But of course, it was the labor movement that won us the right to have two-day weekends, let alone three-day weekends, because labor loses its dignity if there’s no prospect of resting from it.

So I pray this Labor Day weekend that you find a way to create meaningful work in this world, paid or unpaid, at home or outside it. I pray that you see the loving work of God our Creator reflected in the work you love. And I pray that you can find that Sabbath time to rest from all your work, and enjoy it.

A Prayer for Commerce and Industry (BCP p. 259)
Almighty God, whose Son Jesus Christ in his earthly life shared our toil and hallowed our labor: Be present with your people where they work; make those who carry on the industries and commerce of this land responsive to your will; and give to us all a pride in what we do, and a just return for our labor; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Life Together

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Some of you may know that I’m only at St. John’s part-time. Some of you may even wonder what I do with the rest of my time! This week was a typical one for me: a weekday spent working on a ‘virtual pilgrimage’ app for a church in Florida; an early-morning Zoom with a canon from the Anglican cathedral in Singapore about creating digital prayer resources for the Church of the Province of South East Asia (well, for him it was a late-night Zoom, given the 12-hour time difference!); and, most locally and, for the moment, most relevantly, joining the Life Together community as a Prayer Partner.

Life Together is the Episcopal Service Corps program in the Diocese of Massachusetts, a kind of “church AmeriCorps” in which young adult volunteers live together in an intentional community, serve in year-long placements at local parishes and non-profits, and receive training in prophetic leadership, contemplative practices, and community building. It’s a pretty awesome program—and one with which you’re all indirectly connected, since I was a Life Together fellow in 2013-14!

This is my first year as a “Prayer Partner.” Prayer Partners accompany the fellows for a year, meeting with them twice a month as a group to pray for and with them, listen to them, and support them in their life as a community and as individuals.  

It was a huge gift to me to spend Monday afternoon with the fellows at their home in the rectory of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Dorchester, to get to know them and to begin a relationship with them. They’ve dedicated a year or two of their lives to becoming more connected to God, one another, and themselves, and to serving the common good—and they are passionate about the work they are setting out to do.

You can click here to read more about this year’s Life Together fellows. (N.B.: “Micah Fellow” means first-year fellow, “Emmaus Fellow” means a second-year fellow.) I hope you’ll join me in praying for them and for their life together as they begin this new year.