Our Schedule of Services:

Here is our schedule;

more information may be found by downloading the bulletin.

Sunday August 21:

8:30 am In Person Holy Eucharist Service

10:30 am In Person(also streamed virtually) Holy Eucharist Service

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Sunday 10:30 Bulletin



Thursday, August 18, 2022

What Thunderous Love Is This?

This week my wife Megan and I finally carved out some time to go and see the new Thor movie. Juggling work schedules and our toddler’s needs makes it tough to see movies in theaters in this season of our lives, but some things just have a level of sound and spectacle that we want to make the effort for, and we were pretty sure that this would be one of them.

It certainly delivered the spectacle (and now I’m sure Disney can make a good donation to St A’s for my recommendation, surely?). What I wasn’t prepared for was that parts of the movie also just left me weeping silent, compassionate tears.

I’ll try to avoid spoilers (and avoid boring those of you who aren’t interested in comic book hero flicks). But the movie had moments that dealt with dads and daughters. Frankly, the movie could use a trigger warning, as it opens with a villain’s backstory: he’s motivated because he lost his daughter, despite praying that the gods he worshipped would intervene. It was hard to watch that, as a father of a daughter.

But what I think I can reflect on, without dwelling on the film, is that experience of empathy itself. Even though I was watching fiction, I felt a lot of real things, because the life I am living is full of the same kinds of relationships, the same hopes for my child, the same desire to protect her from danger and harm. Even the same fear that I might not always be able to.

I believe in this quite a bit – empathy, I mean. One of the strong lessons I learned in my formation for the priesthood was the simple phrase “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” That one’s stood the test of time in ringing true for me in every ministry I’ve served in. Or I think of how often it takes a personal connection to change an opinion – I remember talking with a priest in his late 80’s about how he came to support the ordination of women alongside men after meeting women studying for ordination, and how he came to support gay marriage when he met people who were living everyday lives, hoping for formal blessings on their marriages and what they meant in their own journeys of faith. That personal connection – a story you know and understand – can make all the difference.

I find that there’s also something sad, or bittersweet, about that. It’s beautiful that having some personal experience, or skin in the game, or an ability to relate, can help move our hearts. But shouldn’t the heart so the faithful be able to take a quicker leap of faith?

To dwell on a personal example: my heart is moved by the need to shelter refugees, and the many passages from the Bible telling first the people of Israel and later the followers of Jesus that they must do so as a commandment from God. But would I have the same focus on these teachings if my own grandmother had not been a refugee? Would I have been as enthused to help when our parish sponsored a refugee widow and her two young boys, if I hadn’t seen in her story the story of my grandmother, left by a husband with three small children?

Most sharply: if the answer is “No, you wouldn’t have been moved,” or “No, you wouldn’t have helped,” then … what about all the people in the world whose needs and lives I can’t relate to now? Whose stories are different-enough that I don’t empathize yet?

Part of the answer to that is surely that God calls the whole world into service of one another. And one of my favorite ethicists, Simone de Beauvoir, wrote in The Ethics of Ambiguity that each person must help where they have “efficacy and opportunity” – that is, where they can be effective in making a difference, and have the chance to do it. So maybe finding the stories we already relate to is a part of how our opportunities arrive. Maybe relating personally is a way that God’s Holy Spirit moves within us to keep us motivated, even when the going gets tough.

But I do think another part of the answer is that we’re meant to care beyond our own experience. We are meant to love the stranger who is different, and not only the newcomer who is already like us. My grandmother was not meant to be loved only by others who had already been refugees. Not only fathers of daughters should strive to protect the children of the world.

So I believe we are called, as Christians, to pray for bigger hearts. Some of it may be as simple and practical as making sure we keep learning new stories, so that our empathy can connect to all of God’s children, on earth as it is in heaven. If having personal relationships is what helps us act as Christians, then perhaps God calls us to the curiosity of meeting more and more people through our lives, with an extra emphasis on hearing from those most different from ourselves.

And meanwhile, it seems to me that we ought to be praying for hearts that go beyond what we already know, and leap into the wildness of God’s loving Spirit, which is already hovering over the waters of every place and generation, holding each beloved person in care and compassion. What would it mean for my heart to love like the Spirit’s? Perhaps, by faith, we can know it, just a bit more.