Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral
The Very Rev. Paul J. Lebens-Englund, Dean
Epiphanytide: Friday, February 5, 2021
Limitation
The monastic virtue of poverty is not simply to teach monastics to hold all things in common, it is meant to teach all of us to regard limitations, not as confining, but as a liberating act of God’s justice for all.
Brother James Koester, SSJE
Dear Saint Markans,
Our ‘season of limitation’ now stretches into its twelfth month – a time of distance and isolation, a time of loss and grief, a time of caution and surrender – yet, even in the darkness of this prolonged uncertainty, the persistent Light of joy, hope, and peace shines brightly within us and among us, radiant and warm, the fruits of those carefully tending to the spiritual fire that unites us to God and to one another.
Your Cathedral clergy gathered with the Bishop and with our ECMN clergy colleagues last weekend to spend a day in retreat with Brother James Koester, Superior of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist. With the primal metaphors of Light and Darkness as our retreat focus, we were invited into shared reflection about our own personal experiences of Light and Darkness over these past many months, asking: What has been lost? What has been found? What new appreciation have we gained? What new insight have we glimpsed? What new limitations have we embraced? What new possibilities have we discovered? What difference will all this make when we re-emerge?
It’s far easier to imagine history as ‘the past,’ rather than ‘the present,’ something we’ve done, rather than something we’re doing. For the Church, history is a living reality, each age responding faithfully to its own unique challenges and opportunities, bringing forth treasures both old and new. The Church’s ‘remembrance’ give us a short-list of words and actions that ground us in God’s timeless presence, provision, and activity among us as a loving, liberating, life-giving force for Good. As an exodus people, our list of essentials is a short one, easily gathered and packed on our backs as we run out the door from captivity to freedom. The words and actions, through which we connect to God and each other across time and space, are purposefully few, simple, replicable, translatable – easily said and done no matter the Light or Darkness within which we find ourselves – whether together or apart, whether rejoicing or grieving, whether free or captive, whether satisfied or longing. No matter the time, nor the place, nor the particular people, it is the bedrock spiritual practices of the Church – practiced together in good times, so we know how to practice them apart in hard times – that help us to hear God’s word and to identify God’s provision in our daily lives – that is, during the vast majority of our time, which is spent away from the Church’s buildings.
What we’ve done as a community these past twelve months is to re-awaken and re-activate those spiritual muscles that too easily atrophy in place. We’ve been forced to make an honest inventory of the essential contents in our spiritual backpacks, knowing we can carry only the basics with us when we flee captivity to present expectations and wander into the wilderness of new possibilities with only the most basic tools to warm our hearts and light our way. Anyone who’s ever found themselves near a night-time campfire without a bottle opener knows well that necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention. So here we sit around our wilderness fire, fed each Sunday with the practice of Word and Sacrament, tended each day with the practice of prayer and study and service – each of us doing our part to keep this holy flame burning among us amidst a changing world and a changing Church, and all this without many of the resources on which we had previously come to depend. And, yet, God is praised, souls are nourished, broken hearts are mended, joy is celebrated, the world is served. In the wilderness, we come to discover the fallacy of ‘absence,’ learning instead that the stars shine brightest in the darkness and the crickets sings loudest in the silence. And it is all good. And it is all God.
So, with our faces softly lit by the glow of this eternal flame around which we sit, I pray you’ll join with me, with your Bishop, and with each other, asking the big questions this holy moment invites: What has been lost? What has been found? What new appreciation have we gained? What new insight have we glimpsed? What new limitations have we embraced? What new possibilities have we discovered? What difference will all this make when we re-emerge?
Ever yours, in Christ’s enduring Love,
Paul+
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