Happy Easter!

I say this not just because I’m basking in the memory of Easter morning, and not just because my house is still full of chocolate rabbits and carrot-shaped candy, but because Easter is not just a day: it’s a fifty-day season, stretching from Easter Day to Ascension Day, which falls on the Thursday after the Sixth Sunday of Easter—a season stretching from April 17 to May 26 this year, a season of celebration even longer than our forty-day season of Lenten fasting.

Easter isn’t a season of fasting or arduous spiritual disciplines, but it can be a wonderful time to continue a daily devotional pattern of prayer. If you’re looking for a way to way to mark this season, I’d encourage you to take a look at 50 Days: Celebrating Easter with Daily Reflections from Forward Movement. It’s a free, online devotional with a new daily post during each day of Easter. You can read it on their website or subscribe to receive it in your email every morning. You might also enjoy Easter Triumph, Easter Joy, a book of daily devotions for Easter written by Scott Gunn, Executive Director of Forward Movement.

I’ve taken a few days off this week, so I’ll continue with my usual newsletter reflections next week. For now, I just wanted to share these resources with you.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed—Alleluia!

I’ve experienced many strange things as a priest, but by far the strangest was being mocked by a man wearing tights and carrying a musket for shamelessly going around outside without wearing a hat.

It was, of course, a Monday morning in mid-April, and I was at the Old Burying Ground in Lincoln, where I had been invited to offer prayers for the fallen British regulars who’d been buried there after the Battle of Concord in 1775. (The Congregationalist minister was invited to pray for the fallen colonial militia. Go figure.) Except for the two clergymen and a rather-uncomfortable representative from the British Consulate, the event consisted entirely of historical reenactors: men dressed in the uniforms of the British Army or the humble clothing of the Minute Men, shooting off blanks from authentic flintlock muskets in memory of the events of the past.

Our Holy Week can sometimes like feel an historical reenactment of the same kind, as we remember the events of the last week of Jesus’ life and act them out: waving palms, washing feet, breaking bread, and even giving voice to the main characters of the story in a dramatic passion play.

Unlike a military reenactment, our emphasis is not on the accurate details of clothes or tools; we do not dress in ancient garb or use first-century soap to wash our feet. Ours is a symbolic reenactment, pulling out a few key practices and moments from the events of Holy Week and reshaping them into the form of our liturgies.

But we share the same simple idea: that human beings are more than disembodied minds. By reenacting what has been, we can learn from and experience the events of the past and allow them to shape us in the present and the future. By reenacting the struggle for freedom, we strive to remain a free people. By reenacting Jesus’ acts of love, we allows ourselves to be formed into more loving people.

So join us, this Holy Week, if you can, as we remember those last few days of Jesus’ life and walk the way that Jesus walked, together.

Palm Sunday — April 10 — 10am

We celebrate Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem with a parade of palms, and remember the crushing disappointment of his betrayal, arrest, and death with a reading of the Passion According to Luke.

Maundy Thursday — April 14 — 7pm

As Jesus gathered with his disciples for a Last Supper together, we share a simple meal. As he taught them his “new commandment” to love one another as he loved them, and then humbly knelt to wash the dirt from their feet, we wash one another’s feet. As darkness fell and he went out to the Garden to pray, we strip the decorations and ornaments from our sanctuary and pray before the Blessed Sacrament in a Garden of Repose.

Good Friday — April 15 — 7pm

We remember again the events of Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, trial, and death with a solemn service of readings and prayers, and venerate the cross on which he died and through which he destroyed the power of death.

Holy Saturday — April 16 — 12pm

One of the simplest, most austere, but most beautiful services of the year, the Liturgy of the Word for Holy Saturday reflects on the day in which Jesus rested in the tomb, and offers prayers drawn from our funeral services.

The Great Vigil of Easter — April 16 — 7pm

Our celebration of Easter begins with the kindling of a new fire and the retelling of the whole story of salvation, stretching from the moment of creation through Easter morning, followed by a festive celebration of the first Eucharist of Easter.

Easter Sunday — April 17 — 10am

We journey with the women who followed Jesus to the door of his empty tomb, and see their astonishment to find him risen, crying aloud our words of praise: “Alleluia! Christ is risen!”

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.