Jacob’s Ladder, by Wendy Ide Williams. Click on her name to see more of her work.
Dear Friends,
Here we are, online again, sharing God’s blessings through a screen, perhaps wondering how this post really finds each other. I am happy to write that at present I feel gratitude—something I have had to pray for lately—for the encouragement I receive through others’ online offerings to me.
Yesterday evening, Evan Craig Reardon, who leads poetry reading workshops at the Cathedral (one beginning Saturday—there is still time to register—and another in August) and I had good conversation about poetry and painting—you can hear us in the Zoom video below. (I am offering a free painting workshop on Zoom on July 25.)
And there are the thank you messages for leading Evening Prayer on Facebook as well as the workshop thank yous and queries. And I just joined the middle of a retreat on Zoom with Sister Katherine (Kitty) Hanley, CSJ, PhD, who will lead a retreat in our Cathedral with the poems of George Herbert on September 20. (It will be in the Cathedral—assuming New York stays open—in keeping with safety guidelines.)
Sister Kitty has been my teacher in spiritual direction and theology. I have found I can rely on her to bring me into God’s presence as the psalmist does—by saying what is true and sometimes terrible so that my heart breaks and, free, can rise from the ashes of what it realized toward praise. She mentioned the Book of Exodus as scripture for our times. We are in exile, she said, naming the terrible ways in which some particularly bear it, and, like the Israelites and those in the middle of a retreat, we do not know how it will end.
True, and this paints an image of us as a people connected to each other through God, I thought—sin, exile and the sometime weirdness of Zoom notwithstanding. The Rite I phrase “manifold sins and wickedness”—though these are not what I have been most bewailing lately—comes to mind along with the grumbling and nostalgia Sr Kitty reminded us that the Israelites fell prey to.
They, and I, grumbled, as though manna falling from the sky and God’s provision born of love, even through technology, are ordinary things for ordinary times—things to take for granted.
Having retreated and loosened my grip on the past, my heart can rise with praise again.
Certainly our times and also God’s grace are extraordinary things—one way is how we own them together. Not knowing how or when our time in exile will end, there is opportunity for freedom from what we thought we knew and for falling deeper into awareness of God’s total imagination and care.
At The Cathedral of All Saints, we fall deeper through conversation with each other.
As Evan always says, there should be MORE POETRY—We are planning the first Hidden Cathedral Poetry Festival for April 24, 2021 with many guests and offerings. Cathedral Arts visionary Eugene K. Garber and his friend, poet Michael Joyce, will present a workshop together. Micheal read a poem for us after we had to postpone the poetry festival until 2021—the video is below. Thank you, Michael. We also like your Kandinsky.