Canterbury at Cal

Each Thursday at 7:00 there is a prayer in the tradition of Taizé in the canterbury house.  This form of contemplative prayer comes from the community of Taizé in Burgundy, France.  Visited each summer by tens of thousands of young adults, the monastery of Taizé explores reconciliation, simplicity of life and contemplation of God as a community experience.  Visit the website at www.taize.fr

The feast of St. Mark the evangelist (a writer of one of the four lives of Jesus used by the Church) occurs on April 25.  Since the feast day falls during the fifty days of Easter if it falls on a Sunday as it did this year then the feast is moved to the Monday following.  This is because celebrating the resurrection of Jesus takes precedence over all other holidays, especially during Easter-tide.

The identity of Mark is uncertain.  For centuries traditions have been built up to say that Mark was a student of St. Peter, a companion of St. Paul and one of the early followers of Jesus.  The Christians of Ethiopia (the Copts) maintain that St. Mark brought Christianity to Ethiopia and indeed the rites and worship of the Coptic church are unique and ancient to their place.  The image of St. Mark is the winged Lion because St. Mark’s gospel begins in the wilderness where the lion lives.

Russian Icon of St. Mark

For many years Mark’s gospel was considered the least of the gospels and St Mark had the nickname “stump fingered” because of his crude Greek syntax.  In the 19th century scholars devoted more serious attention to the book and discovered that it was probably the oldest of the gospel texts (within 30 years of the life of Jesus) and contained a much deeper artistry than had been earlier recognized.

The gospel of St. Mark focuses on the persecutions of the Christian community and offers hope.  Many think it was meant to be heard in one sitting and is thus a text of community. The beginning of the gospel is the prophesy of John the baptist in the desert of Israel.  The gospel concludes with the fear and uncertainty of the women who visited the tomb of Jesus on Easter morning.  For these reasons this text can hold great power for us today.

Many people spend their lives in a personal wilderness looking for an answer, just as the multitudes flocked to hear John the Baptist.  Many are seeking a message of hope.  Also many people wander in fear, even when they have heard what should be good news they do not trust that their life can have meaning.  Mark tells us that the women who ran from the empty tomb on Easter were frightened and said nothing.

Eventually someone found hope and said something as we continue to discuss the story today.

The angel says that Jesus has gone ahead of the women into Galilee.  For many it has been understood that when one finishes hearing Mark’s gospel then one is to follow Jesus as he has gone ahead into their souls. Read the story again and discover Jesus there and then go forth in hope to proclaim that Love triumphs over death.

The Church is now celebrating the fifty days of Easter in which Christians express the joy of overflowing life after the surprising resurrection of Jesus sometime around 33AD. For more reflection on the season and meaning of Easter read the heading on the website “Eastertide”

There are five parishes in the Berkeley area which all offer Sunday morning liturgies.  Please consider worshiping in one.  The Episcopal Church always welcomes you!

St. Mark’s Berkeley  2300 Bancroft Way 8 AM  10AM Choral Eucharist

www.stmarksberkeley.org

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St. Clement’s Berkeley  2837 Claremont Boulevard 8AM 10AM choral Eucharist

www.stclementsberkeley.org

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All Soul’s Berkeley   2220 Cedar Street   8AM 10AM Choral Eucharist

www.allsoulsparish.org

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Good Shepherd Berkeley    9th Street at Hearst   11AM

www.goodshepherdberkeley.org

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St. Alban’s Albany      1501 Washington Avenue (corner of Curtis and Washington) 8AM 10AM

www.st-albans-albany.org

All of the strife of the day, three hours of physical torture on the cross, seventeen hours of betrayal, isolation, mockery, contempt, beatings and heartbreak and now the silence.

Those followers bold enough to stay with Jesus and those who watched as secret friends complete the bare minimum of burial rites and head home for the Sabbath.

Darkness and silence.

“Why must holy places be dark places?”  asks the main character of C.S. Lewis’ novel “Till we have faces”

Indeed this holy space is dark.  John’s gospel which dwells so much on the interplay of dark and light puts us in darkness from the beginning of the passion account.  When Jesus is arrested we are told lanterns were needed to discover the one called the light of the world.  All of the hastily convened legal proceedings happen under cover of night.  The burial must be conducted hastily because the sun is setting.  The very next sentence after the passion account states that Mary of Magdala returns to the tomb while it was still dark.

We are involved in a three day liturgical pilgrimage, and we have the grace to know where it ends, yet in this time we are invited to enter the dark, the cloud of unknowing and ask

“why must holy places be dark places?

There is not, nor will there ever be a satisfactory answer to the problem of pain and suffering.  There are many small answers that work circumstantially but never one answer that will work all the time.  One can try and put a redemptive spin on hurt and mumble with a wincing smile that whatever doesn’t kill me can only make me stronger.  Small comfort.

“Life is pain, princess, anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.”  So observes Wesley in the Princess Bride.

From what we can tell, as a storytelling species we have always struggled with the reality of love, loss and death.  In our oldest epic

Gilgamesh says “ I cannot bear what happened to my friend, so I roam the wilderness in my grief, how can my mind have any rest?”

Mortality is always on the mind.  All those who believed the kingdom of God had finally come were painfully aware of life’s fragility.

Speaking about the martyrdom of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, two months before his own death, drew from the playwright Aeschylus “It is God’s law that he who learns must suffer.  And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart.”  Had the Marys and the beloved disciple read Greek tragedy they might have agreed.

How can we stare at the cross and not be reminded of the people in Haiti, in Chili, in Darfur, in Palestine, in Afghanistan, in Richmond, CA, in Greensboro, AL, in Berkeley who are seemingly permanently affixed on the cross?

They come to the tomb while it is still dark.

When have you been on the cross?  How many times have you been on the cross?  I once spent a year there.  I could not go to sleep at night because of the awful loneliness in my soul.  When I did sleep it was too short and when I awoke the loneliness was still there.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.

I could barely eat and lost almost 40 pounds

I can count all my bones.

Gregory of Nazianzus reminds us “What is not assumed on the cross is not healed.”  The only consolation I took was knowing that my sorrow was there on the cross.

John’s gospel presents us with a Jesus in complete control of his surroundings, ordering all things and yet to those on the ground it still must only seem senseless tragedy.

The author Reynolds Price tells a story of receiving a letter from an 87 year old woman who faced uncertain and exhausting medical tests.  She writes of a vision, not one that came to her but one she went out to meet.  Walking through the hills of Galilee she found Jesus teaching a crowd.  Intending to just listen on the fringe, Jesus looked at her directly and said “What do you want?”  The woman replied, “Could you send someone to come help me stand up after the tests, because I can’t manage alone?”  Jesus thought for a minute and said, “How would it be if I came?”

The only answer God gives us in dealing with pain is the message of the incarnate Word of John’s gospel, who says “How would it be if I came?”  The only way I could trust in my valley of despair was to know that Jesus walked this path as well.

On Easter we will not recognize the risen One until we see the wounds…we are reminded indeed that Jesus did experience this life. My namesake Thomas wanted to touch those wounds, but we are never told that he actually did.  I think all he needed was to know that Jesus could say, “I know how you feel, my heart broke too” and mean it.

And still for many in this world, the hurt is too great and the wounds are all that are seen.

Why must holy places be dark places?

After experiencing the very real darkness and hell unleashed by the Nazis the author Hannah Arendt took on the task of writing about the roots of tyranny in our world.  Although the passion of so many innocent people seemed to be about mortality, Arendt stumbled on the word and reality of natality.  In truth, our faith is about this thing, this natality.  John’s gospel throughout is about natality, about birth and new life.  “You must be born of the water and the spirit to see the reign of God.”

In the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is found a stone called the omphalos or the navel of the world.

On the cross we are experiencing the birth pangs of a new humanity, the tomb where Jesus is laid will be the wellspring of this new life.

Many people on that Good Friday never saw the birth, all they saw was the death of a failure.  As Macbeth says, “out, out brief candle, life is but a tale of sound and fury, told by an idiot signifying nothing.”

Again and again I have conversations with students who struggle with a sense of meaning and purpose for their life.  I too ask these questions of my own life.  Although this angst may be ameliorated by practicing selfless acts, even these do not answer the deep chasm of meaning within the postmodern heart.  Once upon a time we could believe that the world was always improving, we were on an arc of history leading to something new and better.  The 20th century ultimately ground that notion down.

Jesus disappointed Jerusalem because he was not the messiah they wanted.

One of the great voices of this post-modern age, Jacques Derrida has said that our messianic hope must come to us without a horizon – we must hope without expectation.  Although Derrida sought a messianic hope without religion he still provides us with this illuminating point: the only way the messianic hope may emerge in our horizon is if it comes as the wholly other.

The wholly other has appeared on this cross.  We wanted the messiah to look in a way that conformed to our ideals, when that failed to happen we beat and destroyed the image of God beyond recognition bringing forth the reality of the other.

From the cross, the word made flesh sees only family.  “Woman behold your son,” to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” The other desires union, through union with the other birth may happen.

On this tree, at the navel of the world  Genesis is restored.

Natality happens.

Arendt wrote “every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only “message” which the end can ever produce.”

This dark place is holy because it is the place of birth.

Jesus fully empties himself, as the evangelist insists upon when noting the pouring forth of blood and water.  At the base of the cross in the navel of the world life is restored and a new family is made.  Our faith begins in the full giving of Jesus, the complete emptying of a human life.

The water and the spirit are the signs of new life and new birth in John’s gospel.  In this passion account Jesus gives up his spirit and water pours forth.

The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart, another student of natlity, said “If you were to cast a drop into the ocean, the drop would become the ocean and not the ocean the drop.  Thus it is with the soul when she imbibes God she is turned into God.”

We too are the nameless mother and disciple.  We too must take the wholly other into the house of our soul.  We must imbibe of the spirit poured out that we are turned in to God.  We too are the nameless mother and disciple. We too must take the wholly other into the house of our soul. The only counter to the angst of our time we have is this story, the story of the wholly other who said, “how would it be if I came?” and at what seemed to be the darkest moment this other who was one of us began the restoration of humanity.

We do not do this just for the peace of our soul, though that is a necessary starting point, we do this because in this world on this day many people are waking up early while it is still dark.  For many people it is perpetually Good Friday. We must enter the dark and holy space, the fertile birthing ground of the world, and because through the darkness, through the emptying, through the pouring out of living waters we have become one with the wholly other.  We may then proclaim with joy and hope – the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

St. Clement’s in Berkeley 12PM - 3PM music and meditation on the last hours of Christ.

www.stclementsberkeley.org  2837 Claremont Blvd.

All Soul’s Berkeley  9AM Communion from the Reserve Sacrament 10-12 sacrament of reconciliation (clergy will be on hand to hear confession) 12 - 3 Good Friday Liturgy with reflections 3-6 Reconciliation, 7:30 PM solemn liturgy with chanting of the Passion, veneration of the cross and communion from the reserved sacrament

There will be no meetings of the Canterbury group during Spring Break (March 21-28).  Have a great Spring Break.  Don’t forget to sign up for the Episcopal Province VIII College Retreat March 26-28.

The facebook page is:  http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=prov+viii&init=quick#!/event.php?eid=316985342074&ref=mf

The website is: http://www.provinceviii.net/highered/

Below are times of Ash Wednesday observances at various parishes in Berkeley:

St. Mark’s 7:30PM www.stmarksberkeley.org

All Soul’s  7:30PM www.allsoulsparish.org

St. Clement’s 6:30PM www.stclementsberkeley.org

St. Alban’s Albany, 7PM www.st-albans-albany.org

Good Shepherd Berkeley 7:30PM  www.goodshepherdberkeley.org

Canterbury Programs will be on break during Christmastide and the January break.  Programs will resume in late January.  Keep visiting the site for updates!

Grad students and young adults (20’s 30’s) are invited to participate in a weekly discussion group at the Bear’s Lair in the basement of the MLK student center and just off of the Cesar Chavez plaza.  We will be using the monthly publication Context by Martin Marty, emeritus professor of religion at the University of Chicago. Context publishes excerpts from a wide variety of journals, periodicals and newspapers all focusing on important themes of culture and faith. Even if you miss one week you don’t have to catch up just show up. Beverages and light refreshments will be provided. Bring your ID’s or they won’t let you in!

About the Bear’s Lair