December 7th, Advent Day 11
By the time I arrived at the red doors of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, I had been wandering for years. Looking for solace and community, the intimacy and safety of the Wednesday morning Healing Prayer service was what my soul was yearning for. The mid-week respite in the chapel among new friends became the holding place for life changes, grief, loss, celebrations, and renewal. Planted there by the Holy Spirit my entire being (voice, heart, and body) would become the seedling that grew with new eyes “out from the stump of Jesse.”
In 2008 as colorful leaves fell to the ground, a fellow parishioner and I were initiated into another season during a weekend retreat facilitated by a secular Franciscan at St. Francis Springs Prayer Center. The retreat leader shared a first-person account accompanied with videos of lives lost, limited access to food, clean water and shelter in New Orleans and the surrounding communities after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina-- much like what we are witnessing in Florida in the remnants of Hurricane Ian. Water was up to rooftops, cars floating, trees leaning further than one could imagine flexed by bellowing winds, and children clinging to parents.
After the presentation retreatants sat in silence. We were stunned by the unmasked fragility, vulnerability, and desperation amplified by uncertainty, having been cast into the suffering of people we didn’t know, but whom we knew intimately as the Body of Christ. These were women, men, children, poor, marginalized human beings continually caught between natural disasters and principalities which never seemed to provide enough efficient services or adequate sustainable recovery.
It wasn’t long before I realized that I was on a path over which I had no control. The visceral discomfort of the new information and not acting left me with one choice, surrendering to Divine Intelligence. I was to experience the life-restoring role of servant as a lay person in the Episcopal Church. From Crop Walks, Rise Against Hunger, to Costa Rica. From Reader, Eucharistic Minister, liturgical dancer, vestry, delegate at the Diocesan Convention to the Third Order Society of St. Francis (TSSF), a lifetime commitment of living the gospel of Jesus in a dispersed Franciscan community. It was a journey of God’s making and all that meant in a broken world in need of healing.
The retreat was the catalyst for a spiritual transformation that would last more than a decade and beyond. I came to acknowledge that my spiritual growth — driven by orthopraxy, leavened by love and social justice — were deeply intertwined with worship and contemplative practices within a community.
I pray I will always find Christ in the faces of those I meet and the events I encounter. I had found the wholeness I was seeking, the life of spirit with actions that enabled me to hold the paradoxes of life — the absurd and sublime — sustained by looking up to a God found in Mystery.