Epiphany remembered again

Epiphany remembered again

“Arise, shine; for your light has come,

and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” Isaiah 60:1

ed seward

Sunday we are celebrating the Feast Day of Epiphany, the manifestation of the light of Christ to the Gentiles. That’s most of us. I first met Epiphany when I was eleven or maybe twelve years old. A boyfriend and his parents took me to visit her on an icy winter night on January 6th in the mid 1950’s. I sat in the candlelight in the small Episcopal Church in my hometown in tidewater Virginia and heard her ancient liturgy and her haunting mystic melodies. As we walked out of the small-town white wooden church into the bitter cold January night carrying our small candles, the first winter’s snow also came down to celebrate her. Epiphany led me to an experience I wanted to have again and again.

Epiphany revealed to me a living presence, a God, greater than myself that was also greater than time, eminent and transcendent.

But like many epiphanies, I soon became caught up in growing up and going to school and succeeding in life and let her slip away and did not again seek her out for many years until I was a junior in medical school. I was studying and working at a frantic pace. My marriage had recently failed. I felt alone, exhausted, and damaged. I was open to Epiphany’s call. I connected to the dean of the Episcopal Cathedral in Memphis, William Dimmick, and he led me by the hand back to her feast day this time in St. Mary’s Cathedral.

On that Sunday closest to January 6th the darkened stone church was packed with young people. Now I heard haunting ancient as well as contemporary music. The priest of the Greek Orthodox Church read the gospel in Greek. At this service three ornately adorned wise men sang as they slowly and majestically processed down the long center aisle of the nave and laid their gifts on the memorial altar. The service ended as we sang hymns and the cathedral came ablaze with light as our candles were lighted. Like the wise men, we continued to sing as we processed now in the opposite direction, recessing away from the altar and out into the dark night taking our new light out into the world beyond the cathedral.

That January 6th I stayed with Epiphany and she has been my companion for fifty years. Each year we continue to celebrate her gifts twelve days after the feast day of Christmas. She is a reminder of God’s coming, God’s presence to the entire world, not just to a chosen few. We are strengthened by worshiping in new and old ways, the manifestation of the living, eminent, incarnate God, and as we also are strengthened and enlightened by her, we are called to take her light, that love, that enlightenment out, out into a world that is often cold and exhausted, and dark and damaged and lonely.

Epiphany yearly also shows us one more revelation. Out in the world, we see her path in the dark night more clearly because of her great light from so many more candles than our own light.

May this new year be full of many more epiphanies for all of us and those we love.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com

Rohr: Contemplation and Action

Rohr: Contemplation and Action

“The dance of action and contemplation is an art form that will take your entire life to master. Like Moses at the burning bush, many of us begin with a mystical moment and end with social action or what looks like politics..” Richard Rohr Daily Meditations, July 5, 2017. Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 6, 11.

Life indeed is a dance where we sit out the dance as we contemplate the love of God as a mystic or bravely go on the dance floor as an activist for those who have been harmed by fear. An ideal is to do both, but balance often is never our strong suit. When I returned to the life of a “religious” after a five-year interlude from God, I had an insatiable hunger to read and study about God. I think this came from my medical training. If we want to know about a subject, we research and study in depth what has already been written about it. Then for some unknown reason I began to write about what I was experiencing. Again, writing may have come from my immersion in academic medicine spilling into my spiritual life with the call to “publish or perish.”

One December night I remember reading an Advent piece at an early Christmas gathering of the women of St. Mark’s. Mrs. Metcalf, a renowned speech teacher who also sat on our pew at the church, said to me in passing as we were going to pick up our plates for dinner, “It is good to see another mystic.” Mystic, I never thought of myself as a mystic, but suddenly knew I had just been anointed one by a master. Again, I think medical training was a proving ground to develop some insight into seeing God’s presence at work in the world. My job as a radiologist is to look for the unknown and in the shadows and often in the dark by an imaging technique, X-rays or ultrasound, which examines an inside hidden world, just beneath the surface.

God uses every part of our experience. No experience is wasted. Eventually over many, many years of just writing about this experience, I have been moved to action, making phone calls, writing letters, marching, visiting the sick and dying, working with those who have difficulty getting groceries, advocating for prisoners and immigrants, supporting homeless veterans, working with people in recovery. As long as we can see the love of God in our contemplation and in our action, my experience is that we will know one of the fruit of the spirit, peace. When one peace or “piece” is missing, I know I am off track.

I share this dance during the last day of the Christmas season and look forward to learning from the mystic part of each of us that also is seeking to recognize how God will appear next on our dance card in this new year.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com

Brueggemann, Benedict: Christians living in the new year

Brueggemann, Benedict: Christians living in the new year

“The gift of Christmas contradicts everything we sense about our own life. Our world feels unsavable, and here is the baby named Jesus, ‘Save.’ Be ready to have your sense of the world contradicted by this gift from God.” Walter Brueggemann, Devotions for Advent, Celebrating Abundance, p. 67. Westminster John Knox Press 2017.

war memorial chapel national cathedral

We listen to the news. We become depressed. Every day something more terrible happens. We feel helpless, powerless. The gift of love, the gift of Christmas does bring hope.

I keep thinking about St. Benedict. The world is crashing all around him. Rome is being destroyed by Germanic invaders who have taken over his country. He tries to escape and become a hermit. It doesn’t work. He joins a community. He decides the community needs a new way to live together in love and consideration for others and develops The Rule of Benedict.

This of course is an over simplification of this part of history.

The beginning of the prologue to the rule is, Listen with the ear of your heart. This is the call I hear this Christmas season. We are being called to a more intentional living of the rule of Benedict in community.

I am presently beginning a review of the rule for a presentation for Community of Hope training and for Daughters of the King in the next few weeks. Community of Hope is a pastoral care program for non-ordained persons that is steeped in Benedictine Spirituality. The Daughters of the King are women in our congregation called to an intentional life of prayer. I give thanks to friends who decided on studying Benedictine spirituality in these two programs for the new year. They may think we are helping to train others. Maybe so, but in reality, we are all re-training in both of these programs for an intentional living in love and prayer in the coming new year.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com