Beholding, Becoming, & Ron Burgundy

 When Paul says “imitate me” in Philippians today, I wonder how you hear it. I wonder how he means it. “Imitate me.” And not just imitate me, “Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me.” Do you like what he did there? If you imitate me, you’ll be joining the others who already have. That’s right, there’s a line. A bandwagon, if you will. Don’t worry, there’s probably room for you. Paul, channeling his best Ron Burgundy, “I don’t know how to put this. I’m kind of a big deal.” But even before we get to Paul’s reputation in some circles as a sometimes long-winded and/or arrogant grump, it just feels like a smug thing to say. You want the answer? Look no further. Right here. 

But then. This one time, years ago, I found myself in the Badlands of South Dakota and had me rethinking what I thought I knew about St. Paul. I was in the Badlands of South Dakota on a hike that had become unexpectedly treacherous. I was in way over my head. And a more experienced hiker in front of me, who was no less uneasy about our unfolding situation than I was, calmly and humbly comforted me: Jonathan, it’s gonna be okay. It’s not gonna be easy. But watch where I put my hands and look where I put my feet. Put your hands and feet in those places. I’ll do the figuring. You do the following. We’re gonna make it. Together. I promise I won’t leave without you. So, I did. And we did - we made it out of the wilds together. What I’m suggesting is that it’s at least a possibility, for Paul’s haters this morning, that maybe he isn’t only or always smug. Maybe his invitation to imitation is born of shared belonging and compassion.

 

Even so. Even if Paul didn’t come with some baggage (and he does). Even if he could be read more charitably by us (and he can), some people won’t imitate another person, any person, on principle. They want to be original. They want to write their own story. From scratch. But did you know - and they have studies on this - that even our ideas of independence are things we copy from other people? Because you’re trying to be independent like John Wayne, or your grandpa, or whomever. You’re working off a template. While you and I are probably working off different templates, there doesn’t seem to be any real way around the fact that you’re always copying something; that your pure originality is a myth.

In fact, it turns out, the act, the art, of imitation, of consideration and emulation, is a part of our biological hardwiring. It’s automatic. Because we’re made for connection and social belonging. Babies start imitating parents well within their first year of life. At the same time they start copying you, they start to recognize when you’re copying them, too. And they love it! Which explains the addictive properties of peek a boo.

As adults, we continue to mimic one another, sometimes on purpose and sometimes not. And the not on purpose parts are important. They’re important, not so you and I will learn to stop imitating but so that we’ll become aware that we always are imitating. There’s no turning it off. Constantly, unknowingly, borrowing micro-expressions from other people. Constantly, unknowingly, carrying ideas about the world we got from other people: ideas about love and its limits, scarcity and abundance, ideas about what is and isn’t possible, about what is and is not desirable, ideas we will sometimes only later see were not the only way to see, even when we choose to keep them. The expressions are like threads that show us the ways love has shaped us. Attention and imitation are important because we human beings are shaped by our loves.

A theologian friend of mine was taking his oldest kid and a friend to the mall. As he dropped them off at the circle, he called out, “Have a good time at the temple!” The temple was an inside joke between them. It was the dad’s way of reminding his son that formation doesn’t always start with our heads. It happens in the silent spaces of life, in countless invisible decisions of attention and presence. Where you put your treasure, there will your heart be. That kind of stuff. The dad wanted to remind his son that mall shapes a life in a particular direction. Without asking your permission. Just by your being there. Hopefully, the community of faith offers an alternative formation, life that is life, in a different direction. Because, when it comes to imitation, the question is not if but who and to what end? Because the possibility that you can write or control your own story from scratch is, frankly, not on the table.

One of the gifts Lent can maybe be is space to examine the imitations at work in our lives. The patterns, both life-giving and life-diminishing, running in the background, in us. To get honest about the gazes that grab us. What do I notice? What do I fail to notice? What would I like to notice more? Where would I like my heart to be? Maybe Lent can mean an audit of our longings and our loves. Of our screen-time, so to speak. Of the voices we prioritize and direct the fact of imitation toward the One whose love first moved the sun and the stars.

Along these lines, one possible very good use of Lent is to reflect on the examples you first remember observing and admiring, as a child, especially those example of faith. Who in your life first made some part of you come alive: “That!” you felt. I want to be kind like that? Or unexpectedly gentle like that? Or put together like that? Or totally comfortable being not put together. Or not reducible to a partisan box to fit in, like that? Holy like that? Looking back, what was it about that that that captivated your imagination? How would you describe the thing you saw that compelled your heart?

A young Roger Schutz, years away from founding the ecumenical community of brothers called Taize was, he says, only imitating his grandmother when, at the outset of World War II, he moved to a small town, on the edge of the fighting, to make room for and protect Jewish refugees. She had done the same during the first World War. After the war, Roger opened his home again, this time to German prisoners of war. Looking back, he eventually recognized the force of faith in what he had done. But at the beginning, he was only doing what he knew his grandmother would have done. What she had done. Following her in the way opened up his later understanding.

The fact that you and I can live the life of faith, like Brother Roger, before we understand everything there is to know about either God or ourselves is a great relief to me. If fully understanding a thing was a prerequisite to doing a thing, who would ever, for example, get married? Right? So, good news, says St. Paul. Don’t overthink it. If you want to (eventually) understand generosity, give. If you want to become a person of justice, do just acts. If you want to be a person of prayer, pray. Fake it til you make it. Preferably with others who know you well. But, don’t be fooled, it isn’t faking at all. It’s forming it all. It’s learning with our bodies in the community of faith whose eyes, whose lives, hearts, and attention are all set on Jesus. Because we were made for imitation. Where with hearts fixed on Christ we might become like the One we behold.

Because, bad news/good news. Bad news: you and I can’t think our way to holiness. Good News. You were never meant to. “Imitate me.” Paul says. “Follow me,” Jesus says elsewhere. See, even Paul wasn’t being original. Hear in those words an invitation of belonging and love. Consider the possibility that the invitation to imitation is not the end but the beginning of your freedom and mine, true freedom for the People of God. With the Good News that faith names a journey we travel together. Where together, with Paul, with and in one another, we might also hear our Savior say to us: watch where I put my hands and look where I put my feet. Put your hands and feet in those places. I’ll do the figuring. You do the following. We’re gonna make it. Together. I promise I won’t leave you alone.

Amen.

You Cannot Win Your Life (A Sermon for Ash Wednesday)

The other day I took my daughter, she’s six, to a friend’s birthday party at a trampoline park. For the next two and a half hours, I watched her run as I have never seen her run. Fierce and determined. Hair flowing wildly behind her. She jumped with courage. Climbed every obstacle in her path. She laughed with her friends until her shoulders shook. She was utterly in her element. “Dad,” she told me later, “The whole time it felt like a dream. I didn’t believe it. I had the very best time.”

My daughter had the very best time. This, despite never noticing a large, shiny, electronic leaderboard hanging prominently over the middle of the jumping course, listing in real-time the ranking of the children, as measured in jumps completed. My daughter had the very best time, despite having no idea that for the majority of the two hour session she, who is among the youngest and smallest children in her class at school, placed in the top 10 - out of more than a hundred kiddos - on that board. Now, I thought about this. I can’t say for sure, but I don’t imagine that this knowledge would have added one iota to her euphoria when she said to me, Dad, the whole time it felt like a dream. I had the very best time. The board was impressive, even suggestive of what mattered most. But, in the end, it was silly. What, after all, can it mean to win jumping with friends?

Similarly, delivering a commencement speech years ago at Northwestern University, Stephen Colbert one time observed to a quad full of eager college graduates, “You cannot win your life.” You can’t win jumping with friends, and you cannot win your life. It’s a memorable saying that belongs on the Mount Rushmore of True Things I Love and Frequently Live as if I Do Not Believe. Or TTILAFLASIDNB, for short. 

You cannot win your life. But here’s my dilemma. I’m a good American who was taught early on that a tie is like kissing one’s sister. That winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. And, for these and other reasons, soccer is a fraud. Let me ask you. What would the alternative to winning your life even be? That’s the challenge for my 21st century American imagination. At the 2024 summer Olympics, Noah Lyles won the closest track finish ever when he outran Kishane Thompson in the 100 meter sprint by a record five thousandths of a second. That’s 0.005. Do you realize the absurdly amazing levels of technology required to manufacture a winner of a race that close? But we do have the means to decide it. Consider how fantasy football has given way to legalized sports gambling and - setting aside questions of morality for a second - consider how it turns so much of life into a thing to be won. You can now bet not just on the outcomes of games but on individual performances, even real-time wagers as to whether this or that shot will go in. Each ball and strike. One prop bet for this year’s Super Bowl was whether Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would get engaged directly after, and again the point isn’t whether or not you should care about Tay Tay and Travis but how so much of our cultural mindset imagines every second of our experience as a thing to exploit, to win or to lose, most often as measured in money. Because every second should bear a profit. 

Jesus says today, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Another beautiful saying on the mountain of True Things I Love and Frequently Live as if I Do Not Believe.

There your heart will be also. Where is your heart? If you listen closely, that’s the question Ash Wednesday asks you today. Where is your heart? What are you trying to win? At whose expense? Would you believe that the God of all things doesn’t give a lick for the leaderboard of our victories? And, if this is true, what would you be willing to reconsider about your life and the bedrock, the foundation, of its worth?

Maybe that’s why Jesus gives his followers this warning. Beware of practicing your piety before others. See how he names that even religion is something we sometimes slip into imagining as a thing we can win, over against those who differ from us in ways we judge to be unforgivable. See how even something like love of God and love of neighbor can be warped by a leaderboard with real time rankings in ways that decay and undo the heart of it all. But, if in Christ Jesus the scorecards have all, in the final analysis, been thrown away, then my love toward my neighbor isn’t winning me heaven, it’s allowing me to become more true. If the scorecard is silly, and instead, all things come of Thee, O Lord, then even the love I think I’m giving you is really God’s gift to me and you together, giving us the gift of a life that remembers our kinship to each other and all those who are made in and bear the image of God in this world. In other words, embracing lives of love, first of all God’s own, is how we’re made real. Why do I settle for winning my life, when I could instead live my oneness with God and with you as a beloved child of God in the household of God? Why waste my life with winning when I might more rightly find my place in a holy communion and come to thank God for the gift of it all? Where, O Lord, is my heart?

So, today, following Joel’s advice to “rend your hearts and not your garments,” we pray for hearts that can both seek and grieve. Hearts that seek God and hearts that can grieve the ways our attempts to win life have wounded the world and the heart of the One who loves it. We grieve especially the places in our lives and in the world where creatures of God are in any way diminished or destroyed. We pray for hearts open to remembering that to love a sister or brother is to find our lives caught up in their own. Rend your heart and not your garments. Let God’s all-compassionate heart break open your heart. Take your Savior at his word when he says that to find your life, we must lose it.

The ashen cross on our heads today confronts us with a new possibility and a true invitation.

What if the only way to be not afraid isn’t to win every battle (with the unfortunate side effect of imagining the world as a series of battles) but to embrace the depths of our vulnerability, our fragility, even our mortality, and discover new lives of deeper trust in the living God?

Because there’s no getting out of life alive. So, there is no winning life, much less love. There is only dying and being given new life. The life that is life: the abundant life of giving, forgiving, being forgiven, and trusting that the God who made you and will never forget or forsake you; will not let life or death or height or depth or anything else separate you for the breadth and the depth of God’s love for you. Will forever bless, hold, and keep you. And this is exactly what this holy day means to tell you. 

Amen.

Funeral Homily for Linda Balzersen

From her hospital bed, where Linda had just shared the diagnosis that would eight weeks later end her life, and never being one to talk long about herself, Linda abruptly changed the subject. She began talking pickles. Pickles? I asked. Pickles. Evidently, she had said something the weekend before that she was concerned might have hurt her grandson, Rylan, and she was determined to make it right. Aside: it is impossible to overstate Linda’s love for Rylan and her whole family. Thus the need to make it right. “But it can be awkward,” she said, “to just dive into a difficult thing like that, without context or some kind of safe container, but it’s important that you do find some way to circle back,” she explained. She went on, “Having an occasion can make it easier!” And the occasion, she explained with the biggest of smiles, was to be an invitation to share some fabulous, recently discovered pickles with her grandson. “Because who says no to pickles?” she asked, as if no objection were imaginable. After a pause to consider her plan, she nodded her head, deeply satisfied that she had found a way to make a bruised thing right. To risk love that might heal; Linda believed, after all, that every love takes patient tending, that love is proven in the mending. So many times in this life we let our loves settle for unwanted distance because the risk required to make love true asks more than we fear we have. Sometimes love requires both our courage and careful attention. Daunting for must of us. But good news for Linda. Careful attention was what she did best.

I’m sure you could choose other words, maybe better words, to describe Linda Balzersen, but the two I keep returning to are meticulously wholehearted. Wholehearted. Love communicated oftentimes without a word - through sparkling, frequently mischievous, eyes. Radiant. 

And meticulous. Detailed. Thoughtful. Painstaking. Aware that the prayer shawl laid on the shoulders of the dying, the grieving, of the priest could only become a comfort to a soul though the invisible labor of ten thousand stitches counted. Endless knits and pearls completed. Row on row made accountable to the integrity of the whole, so that, together, they might be privileged to convey the love of prayers that human hands could touch. 

Meticulously wholehearted. Gentle. Patient, at peace with tedium, even. Which surely served Linda well through decades of work in church offices. 

Linda’s life is a remarkable reminder that patience in prayer, contemplative prayer, holy silence, can birth patience with the everyday world, too. And with people. In other words, meticulous wholeheartedness makes so much more than kneelers. Linda loved the Episcopal renewal movement, Cursillo, with its motto “make a friend, be a friend, bring a friend to Christ.” And in those words you can almost see Linda imagining that as handiwork, too, as mending, as making whole the fabric of things the way they were meant to be. Knit together in and by God’s ocean deep love for Linda and each one of us. Every last one of God’s own.

So, dear Linda, today, consider. When, in John’s gospel, Jesus promises to prepare a place for you, you know by now he wasn’t just washing sheets. The Love that knit you in your mother’s womb, who delights in every detail of your being who, in every trial and joy of earth, was with you, prepared for you a place. A thousand thousand pearls and knits stitched in love with the whole of you in mind. 

Dear friend, in the letter of Revelation, too, you know how the promise goes: how, the saints from every corner gathered ‘round the throne, God wipes away the tears from their eyes. Where the promise is not like the old shampoo tagline - no more tears - is not that life’s griefs or difficult parts are erased from eternal memory, lest a single stitch of love be dropped, but the promise is exactly that love’s every grief is seen and touched, healed. Every last tear tended. Patiently. Meticulously. Wholeheartedly. 

That’s when you and I discover that all this time Linda was actually putting those theatre degrees to work! Performing, not inauthentically, but from the truest parts of her, performing the love she knew in Jesus, attempting to point us all, love us all, to the One whose love makes us one. In whom nothing is ever wasted and everything belongs.

Angelic is a word you sometimes hear used to describe Linda. It feels both silly and true at the same time, to say it. Linda wasn’t perfect. But of course that’s not what angelic means. Angelic means a messenger. I remember walking through the hospital door, that last time we spoke. After unpacking the diagnosis with me, Linda looked up at my face. “Jonathan,” she said, “Don’t be afraid.” And suddenly she is the angel announcing resurrection from the vertigo of the grave, through the tears of our grief. Later that day, she shared with me her own surprise that she was not afraid. She didn’t know exactly how to account for this. She could see, looking back, how in every moment, every encounter, with her family, so many of you, by every love and opportunity, God had stitched together a fabric of faith such that she was not afraid. In turns out, Linda Balzersen doesn’t have a monopoly on meticulous attention and seemingly endless compassion. At best she was an understudy. No, the attention and compassion that finally matter most belong to God, to her Lord, whose steadfast love never ceases, whose mercies never come in an end. Not in life, not in death. Whose perfect love casts away every fear.

So today, with Linda and the great communion of saints to which with her help we know we’ve been knit, we sing the love of our Lord Christ Jesus, crucified and risen, our Savior and brother, who loses not one of his own.

Amen.

Funeral Homily for Lane Chambers Nestman

The first thing to say makes sense of the others. The first thing to say is that Lane loved her family. And sought above all to provide for her family. With her family, in her work, at this church, with her friends, she expressed what Matt calls a kindness different from niceness. Does that make sense? he asked me. A kindness different from niceness. It absolutely makes sense. A kindness different from niceness, lived out in ordinary moments. Small moments. Real moments of a life. With others. For others. In ways that made them visible. In ways they’d later call something like an encounter with sweetness.

Matt’s observation about Lane made me think of the early 20th century American singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie. Guthrie one time wrote: Love makes the big world little and the little world big. Lane shared a kindness different from niceness into the small corners of life, and maybe that’s because it’s only the small, ordinary corners of life that can carry love that big. Love that is authentic and real.

Attention to the small and ordinary does not come naturally to most of us, but then I learned Lane was a gardener. This helped me understand. Because gardeners inhabit the world of the ordinary. They’re the original down to earth people. Gardeners trade in the soil from which we literally get words like humility. Depending on things like weather and rain will do that to you. 

Lane loved to plant literal seeds but at some point, I suspect, seed planting became a way of life for her. The way she saw the world. The way she loved her friends, her family and grand-babies. She served over twenty years with the Mortar Board, investing in the flourishing of student leaders. Planting seeds. Those who worked with her at UNT remember both her kindness and that they learned from her. Her seed sowing was as generous as it was gentle.

I don’t know if she was mindful of it, but Lane’s love for the planting of possibilities toward the good and the beautiful, not least for her family, gave her a special kinship with the Lord that she loved. After all, on the first Easter Day, when Mary Magdalene was lost in grief at the tomb, maybe like some of us today, when Jesus met her and she didn’t know it was him, who else did she mistake him for, but the gardener? On the one hand, it was a real mistake. Grief can sometimes make it hard to see. On the other hand, it was the truest truth. Standing with her was the one who had brought God’s children back to Eden. Who broken death open. Who had brought new life to fullest flower. “Unless a grain of wheat fall into the soil and dies,” Jesus said, it remains just a grain. But he became the seed who laid down his life, and the seed became life, became a great tree, with branches reaching wide with the possibilities of God, so that, Jesus said, every bird might find a home there, in the branches of that tree. And I want you to hear the echo of that mustard seed promise in John’s gospel this morning: In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. 

And in that home, every grief Lane knew in this life is known. Her last years with dementia, every wound those years contained, along with every tear. All of them, tended, like a tender plant, by the Gardener whose love is life for all people. In the reading we hear today from Revelation, the saints from every corner gathered ‘round the throne, we’re given the promise that God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. The promise is not like the old shampoo tagline - no more tears - it’s not that life’s difficult parts are erased, lest some love or rose among the thorns be harmed in the process, but that love’s every grief is seen and touched and healed. Every tear tended. With the compassion of the True Gardner. Church, do you here this? The saints who are gathered are allowed to have tears. Because their tears have become seeds of love.

It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. In quiet kindness, which is different from niceness, with the patience of a gardener, and not without some stubbornness, Lane has waited for the salvation of the her Lord, whose steadfast love never ceases, whose mercies never come in and end. Not in life, not in death. So we sing the love of God today by which Lane has been brought, through Christ Jesus our Lord, from bud to glorious flower.

Amen.

A Pastoral Letter from Father Jonathan

This pastoral letter is taken from this weeks' James Journal, for St. James Episcopal Church.

“We who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” 1 Cor. 10:17

Dear Friends,

When I was a kid, I loved to pretend. My brother and I made the playground next door into an obstacle course of lava. We took turns being Indiana Jones - hat, whip, and all - leaping from swing to swing as we narrowly averted our fiery end. 

As I’ve grown older, I’ve discovered I don’t like pretending as much. When Rebekah and I experienced the first of two devastating miscarriages back some years ago, I realized I couldn’t pretend I was okay. More than that, I didn't want to. My first day back in the office, I gathered my staff in the office and named that I would need to ask their permission and grace to bring my tears to work in days ahead. 

The understanding of my staff that day was balm to my heart, made all the more remarkable because it was for pain they did not feel. I prayed that asking their grace would also make space for them to bring their own whole selves into the space we shared each day. After all, we each carry, in our lives, unique collections of wonder, sorrows, and joys.

Just now, we are two days out of a national election that has left some of us much relieved and others of us deeply grieved. Both feelings speak to anxieties and fears we have carried about the kind of future we will share. Given the circumstances, it would be tempting to pretend that the moment is not as tender as it is. To talk about the weather. 

But I want to encourage you who have been made members of the Body of Christ: our differences, which are many - and so often a source of a diversity of blessing - do not define the limits of our love for one another. Neither is direct experience of another’s pain pre-requisite for holding holy space with them. In other words, in the communion of God’s holy ones, there is room for your whole self: your own unique collection of wonder, joys, and sorrows.

A favorite hymn sings that, “the Love that made us makes us one.” These days, and truly all our days, give us an opportunity to practice with each other a oneness and love that doesn’t make sense apart from Jesus. I thank God for the company of the saints at St. James who constitute a school of holy friendship and healing ground for the possibilities of God. Consider, especially just now, that “it is revolutionary to maintain a soft heart, to practice kindness, to take what concrete actions that you can to ease the suffering of others.”

None of us knows, in one’s life, all that love will finally ask of them. But we do know love’s Source. Walk with the Lord and each other. If, along the way, you need a listening ear over coffee, give me a shout. And may the harmonies we learn in him to sing be a blessing in this world.

In the love of Jesus,

Jonathan

How to be an Amateur

As a priest’s kid, I spent a lot of time growing up sitting around churches waiting for other people to “wrap it up.” I spent so much time in naves, and a fair bit in Dad’s office, too. There, in the office, I regularly found myself distracted (and likely, looking back, shaped) by the title of a particular book he kept on the shelves. I never read the book; it was the title by itself that shaped me. The book was provocatively called, “God is an Amateur.” 

“Obviously,” the cynic might smirk. But the back of the book unpacked the original meaning of the word, which hinted toward the direction of the book, where the word amateur means one who acts out of love.

Before NIL and the 1992 Dream Team, collegiate sports and the Olympics were both thought to be the realm of amateurs: unpaid athletes whose did a thing “for the love of the game.” Looking back, the imagined purity of these unpaid athletes was wildly naive and, as the athletes came to make increasing millions for their backing institutions, also exploitative. Still, the idea that love for a thing in one’s life almost always comes before the profitability of that thing in one’s life feels true. Kobe Bryant was one time asked if the great basketball players had one predictable characteristic in common. His answer came quickly: “That’s easy. It’s love.”

Can I ask you a question? What do you love? What things are you doing when you act out of love?

I spent an hour visiting with Mother Bubba Dailey the other day. Mother Bubba is a retired priest, beloved member of St. James, and living saint of the diocese (who, she would want me to add, celebrated her 88th birthday this past Sunday). She shared stories with me of some of the things she most loved to do working with those without homes, the sick, and the dying, through her work at the (then) Austin Street Shelter. One day, for example, she took a young man to a baseball game - his dying wish. It turned out to be the last thing he did; he died later that day. 

Mother Bubba loves that she was able to facilitate the dying wishes of so many in her lifetime. She loves loving other people out loud, which is to say, with her life. She also loves being present to God’s love for us. “Jonathan,” she said, “if people really sat with it. God’s love for us. For each person. I’m going to cry. The love is so great. If people were to stay present to it, Sundays wouldn’t be enough. It’s all too wonderful to bear.” 

Because God is an Amateur. God acts out of love. 

Even for me and you.

Reflections on the Forthcoming Bishop Election, Jude's Summer Camp, and Avery the Pig

The Episcopal Diocese of Dallas is in the process of discerning its next bishop. So, I received a diocesan survey in my email this week, asking about what I (and others) hope our diocesan life can be like and what I (and others) imagine will be helpful in our next bishop. As I read, I found myself remembering a story of Brother Roger of Taizé, which I include here as a footnote because my daughter says, "It's interesting but not why people will click on the link, assuming anyone does."(1) The short of it: in the 1960s, as part of the ecumenical movement spurred by the 2nd Vatican Council, Brother Roger warned leaders that, in order for ecumenical conversations to be lastingly meaningful, people would have to be helped to see the material, tangible difference ecumenism made to real lives. It couldn't just live in our heads.

As I read the survey, I found myself thinking that the same is probably true of the sometimes vague thing called "diocesan life". The life of a diocese (a diocese is those churches united under a bishop across a geographic region), must likewise be material and tangible, down to the detail of a life. Beyond an annual congregational visit and a financial assessment, I mean. 

In fact, I one time heard a story (maybe apocryphal) about a church in a land far, far away that was basically Anglican/Episcopal in the shape of its Sunday worship but not affiliated with a diocese. An Episcopal priest asked the cleric of the independent church, who was a friend, why, in the absence of any doctrinal differences of substance, he didn't just join the diocese they shared. It would be natural to who you already are, he suggested. "Because," the colleague answered, "The only material difference my people would see is a $20,000 / year hit we just can't afford."

Now, I'm one of the strange ones who loves that our churches are connected by material, financial support. We belong to each other. Let's live that truth generously toward each other and support congregations who need it. So I've got no shade to throw at, or apology to give for, financial assessments. No, the scandal is not that life together would make a material difference to this particular church but that the assessment was the only difference to their common life the priest could see or imagine. Surely, there's more, right? Or, what is the full substance of our belonging?

This is always love's question, made new for each generation: how can invisible bonds of unity and affection, of belonging, be made visible to each other and to the world? How can you make love light up, like a tastefully tacky neon sign?

In the midst of these thoughts, my son goes away to summer camp, Camp All Saints, the diocesan camp at Lake Texoma. (He has a great time.) As we make our way to camp, we turn onto Stanton Way. Bishop Stanton had confirmed me in 1993, I tell my kids. I remember diocesan youth dances and mission trips I attended as a kid, my own kids listening kindly, or at least pretending well. I point out a path down which my parents, with others, helped build a stone chapel some decades ago. I remember, as a kid, being dragged along to so many Cursillo closings (and how, if the service happened to be in Flower Mound, we kiddos would hope to see the retreat center's mascot, Avery the pot-bellied pig). I remember the faces of those attending these renewal weekends and their complete overwhelm at the number of loved ones and strangers who showed up at the closing service to encourage and support them. We are one. 

As we drop Jude off at camp, I find myself at each table of the registration process surrounded by familiar faces from so many churches. I find Nurse Nancy, of our own St. James(!), who has promised to keep a special look out for Jude (wholly unnecessary, but an unimaginable gift to my Dad Heart). And then, a week later, the last day of camp, I get up early and pack up the car with one of the kids, to join other parents and families, with all of the campers, for the closing Eucharist. Bishop Stanton, now long-retired, is there to lead the closing. Jude, I reflect, is twelve, nearly thirteen, the same age I was when I was confirmed. And Bishop Stanton preaches about the history of the chapel we are in. How it had first been a chapel for German prisoners of war in this country. And then a church in Commerce. And then the chapel at All Saints. He tells the kids he thought it was an important story to know: that these walls had only ever been a place for prisoners to know the freedom of Christ. And then he tells a story I thought my dad had stolen from someone else. I think they both stole it from Bishop McCrea, first priest of my mom's home church.

Still at camp, as Thea and I make our way up to communion, I explain to my six-year-old daughter that the bishop will distribute the bread standing up, without a rail to kneel on, so she'll need to throw her hands up high (she's tiny and still growing). She surely does, and (I think) her boldness throws Bishop Stanton for a loop. His eyes grow wide, he takes a step back, then catches my eye and throws me a wink with the kindest smile. This is how we pass it on, I think.

I sometimes worry about diocesan offices (not ours, specifically, but all of them, generally). That, if they're like me, they might from time to time feel the burden of justifying their existence through "ways to be useful." Probably workshops and leadership days. Attempts to give "the rest of us" their expertise, frequently inadvertently underwriting silent assumptions that local churches lack what they need. (I think most just need listening.) Don't get me wrong: workshops and leadership days can be beautiful things, but our belonging doesn't need to be justified. Besides, diocesan life is more like a pig! More like capture the flag on an open field, with eyeblack and camo. Or serving with strangers to build someone a home.

Which is to say, like shared laughter. Joyful tears. Collaborations. Growing circles. Holy friendships. Deep connection. Love that lights up.

I realize I run the risk of sentimental nostalgia. I am growing old. But age means I no longer remember everything, which makes it easier to appreciate the importance of the things I do remember, things that made marks that still linger.

My point isn't to impose my stories as a norm for others. So maybe it's an invitation to tell yours, too. I know I'd love to hear them! What imagination for life together in the faith - church to church, life to life, and across distance - has the Spirit of God shown you? Where did the mercy of God leave marks in your life through the communion of holy ones, beyond only the local, in ways you long to pass on?

In Episcopal polity, the word diocesan functions in two ways: as a noun, it means bishop; as an adjective, it means relating the life of a diocese, which that space, that geographic jurisdiction, a bishop oversees. And in the space the bishop oversees, the Spirit surprises in all of God's people. There is openness of heart. Like Brother Roger understood, "that in order to pass on the Gospel to young people a reconciliation of Christians [is] necessary." Maybe Brother Roger was onto something about the leading of young people (the former university campus minister asks rhetorically). Did you know that, in the Diocese of West Texas, the cathedral (or bishop's seat and symbolic center of the diocese) is Camp Capers? And its vocation of gathering God's people together is north, I believe, of 3/4 of a century now? Maybe diocesan life is the holy play that takes place outside of our walls with one another.

And if you've never been to summer camp or diocesan leadership day, don't worry. That's most of us, I figure. No matter! Remember: we are all a part of this one holy thing. It's the invisible gift of the Spirit! But there's that great question again: Can we make love light up, like a tastefully tacky neon sign? How do individual and congregational Christians smell and embrace that great diversity and variety of wildflowers residing within the single, glorious garden St. Francis de Sales calls God's holy, universal church?