Expectation vs. Expectancy

Advent 3, Guadalupe, December 11, 2011St. Christpher's Episcopal Church

Oh, to go back in time and redo something!  You've all seen the car insurance ads on TV where you witness an accident, and then all of a sudden time stops and begins to run backward, and bit by bit everything gets put back as it was?  Then the sales-pitch tells you that this insurance agency will make everything like it was before.  We've all had that feeling when you start to get that queasy feeling in your stomach about all the headaches to come.  Oh, if we could only...  In one of the Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis, Aslan, the lion that represents Christ, says to the one of the children who was feeling precisely this way, “We're never told what would might have been."  The message is clear:  What happened, happened.  There may be a second chance, but it is a second chance, not a first.  Each and every event has its place in the fabric of time.

This is not bad news, Or even just depressing news.  It is really good news.  The redemption of time is not going back to redo it, it's drawing even greater truth, justice, love and grace out of the mess that we made than could ever have happened before.

Such a time might have been the 4th decade of the 16th century in south-central Mexico.  The year is 1531, it is 10 years after the clash of worlds in which the Aztecs, the most powerful nation in Central America at the time, fell rather precipitously to the superior weaponry and underhanded ways of the Spaniards under Cortez.  The Spaniards quickly replaced one bloody and cruel regime with another bloody and cruel regime.  They imposed a foreign rule, a foreign tongue and a foreign God.  Such was the suppression of the Aztec that it was not unknown for a young Spaniard to try the edge of his sword on a whim on the body of a hapless passing Indian surf with fatal results with no legal consequences whatsoever.  Mass baptisms of thousands at once subjugated everyone to a new form of religion that kept the moneyed and powerful at the top of the heap.  It was just not a good day to be an Indian.  I wonder how many of them wished they could turn the clock back 10 years and do things differently!

Into this scenario comes a most wondrous gift.  I will not walk through the story in detail, you have an insert in your bulletin for that.  But to summarize quickly, Juan Diego, a pious Indian, is headed to church one dawn, and goes by the hill of Tepeyac, one-time sacred site to the Aztec.  On the top of the hill he hears singing, and turns to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary, her glow set all the rocks and plants of the hill to shining in rainbow colors.  She beckons him come up, in his own native tongue, and he does.  She speaks words of kindness and love, identifies herself as the Virgin Mary, and then sends him to the Bishop to ask for a church on that site.  What a fool’s errand:  An Indian asking the Bishop for a church!  Out of the frying pan, into the fire!

This season our theme is expectancy.  Expectancy waits with open heart and hopeful spirit for the working of God.  In spite of setbacks and opposition, in the final show-down Juan Diego takes roses the lady has given him in his "tilma" or poncho to the Bishop,

And when he spills them on the floor of the Bishop's audience hall the image of Guadalupe is emblazoned upon it.  The Bishop sees the miracle and immediately is converted.  He orders the church be built the very next day.  Notice a most wondrous thing, and for me the most significant thing that happens.  The Bishop takes orders from the Indian.  The first shall be last and the last shall be first.  The poor find justice and the powerful find mercy.  Expectancy pays off in spades!  The question of historicity aside, you see why I like this story!  It is an extended parable about liberation and human dignity, not unlike the American Revolution.

And this is the wonder of the expectancy of Advent:  Expectancy watches to see how God will take our mess-ups and our problems and our sin, and bring out glory and justice and peace and grace, redeeming the time and redeeming the acts.

Things are what they are.  We can have all the expectations we want about them, try to force our preconceived ideas upon them, pushing and managing others into playing out our scripts for them, and end up deeply disappointed in the end, or we can live in expectancy rather than expectation.  It is a silly little play on words, but let it symbolize the difference between a willful imposing of our own wills on our world, and a willingness to let the will of God manifest itself in surprising and powerful ways.  Expectancy watches for how God might do something unexpected, find a way that does not leave winners and losers, but justice and mercy for all.

We would all like to be like Juan Diego, but in reality we sit more easily in the Bishop's chair.  We wield resources most of the rest of the world will never dream of seeing.  We have opportunities for influence that most do not have.  But in many ways the Bishop is the hero.  He converts, he changes, he switches from expectation to expectancy, and then he looks for ways to share in what the Spirit is doing.  Expectancy watches for ways the Spirit is showing up in win-win situations.  It is not concerned with preserving one's place or making a name for oneself.  It is concerned only with discovering the movement of the Spirit.  It draws its inspiration from John the Baptist, who came, as we see in today's Gospel, as a herald of the Messiah, one who notices, and points excitedly to what the Spirit is doing, and then steps in to fulfill his part in it.

In the end the words of Isaiah apply to us all:  The Spirit of the Lord is upon us, because He has anointed us to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor!

I know that only the most ambitious of you all have all your Christmas shopping done.  Few of us need more “stuff,” many in the world need basic necessities for justice and human dignity.  In response, many people now give alternative gifts at Christmas.  Through Heifer International you can give a flock of geese for $20.  A water buffalo goes for $250.  What is the Spirit nudging you to do?  Maybe alternative giving is not for you.  The question still stands,  What wonderful unexpected surprise awaits you as you follow His lead?  How can you make the Kingdom come?

Wrappings

Christmas Day, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church (I know this is late, but better than never, right?)

One Christmas many years ago when our boys were small, my wife pulled the big one on me.  I had ordered a book on falconry from a friend of mine.  I was really looking forward to delving into his abundant wisdom on the topic, but it didn't come and it didn't come and it didn’t come.  Karisse was dismissive about it.  “Oh, it will be here soon enough, don't worry about it.” She said.

Well in the rush and bustle of Christmas I did forget about it.  On Christmas morning there was an enormous box under the tree with my name on it.  Inside the box was another box, a little bit smaller, and also wrapped.  Inside that one was another, and another and another until I finally got to an envelope at the bottom of the last box--with a clue in it!  Eight clues later, with all three of my boys giggling with delight, I discovered the last box, inside of which was my book!  The great trail of discovery was marked throughout the house with piles of wrapping paper and empty boxes!

What is it about wrapping presents?  Why do we do so?  The wrapper is certainly not the point of the present, it would be a present wrapped or not.  Is it not merely in-the-way, a pretty inconvenience at best, or is there more?  We recently shipped Christmas presents to our son and daughter-in-law in Minnesota along with something for our granddaughter (of course!)  Seems what we sent her wasn't nearly as much fun as the Styrofoam peanuts used to pack it all!  How cute it is when children get more taken by the wrapper than the present, but also how obvious a sign of immaturity!

Wrapping paper really is important in the final analysis.  A wrapper at once indicates and hides a surprise.  It points to something and yet at the same time hides it from view. and it invites our active participation in ripping it away to reveal the real treasure.  In that sense, the story of the first Christmas season is a great big present for us to unwrap.  Christmas only really becomes the birth of the Christ in our hearts when we rip away the paper to reveal the present within.  There are three layers of paper that wrap up God’s present in the Christmas Story, and unwrapping each of them reveals a vital truth about the treasure within.

The first layer is the Stable, the manger and the Star.  This represents our outer world, the world of senses, with special music and wonderful food and beautiful candle-light services.  These are all really good, and like the red and green paper on our packages at home they have a way of getting us in "the Christmas Spirit."  We all like the glitter and the tinsel and the songs and the food.  Yet, we also know that Christmas is much more than that.  When we look beyond and behind them, when we in a figurative way rip them away to find the treasure, we find that the Stable is where the Lamb of God sleeps, the Manger is His throne, and the Star is His celestial sign.  When we rip the external trappings of Christmas down from first place prominence they suddenly take their proper place, as glowing signs pointing to the Wonder of the Ages!

The second layer is Joseph.  Joseph obviously loved Mary, but when she turned up pregnant before they began to live together he had a problem.  Such things were punishable by stoning in that day, and so, as St. Mathew tells us, he resolved to end the betrothal quietly so as not to cause scandal.  That is because Joseph is a good man, who knows how to maintain a good public image.  Obviously, though he married Mary, he had overestimated her.  He could not really take her to wife now.  This was the wise and compassionate way out.  He was, after all, just as good at maintaining his ego as we are ours.

But then Gabriel appeared to him in a dream.  Mary was not to be divorced, and the child was to be named Jesus--Yeshua, like Joshua of old, who would save God’s people.  All of a sudden the paper of protecting his ego was ripped away by a divine call.  He was to become the guardian of the Son of God, not unlike us, if we, too, will have the Christ child born within.  Our previous efforts at self-protection must fall by the wayside, and our lot must be cast with this child.

The third layer is the Shepherds and Angels.  These men were good at what they did.  They knew how to attend to ewes during the lambing season.  They knew how to drive away the wolves and the jackals.  They knew how to protect their jobs—to deliver to the owner of the sheep a well and healthy flock.  Not unlike us, they were good at building their bank accounts and their retirement packages.  And these things are not bad, they just last only as long as our lives, nothing more.

But the angels' message suddenly changed all that.  Ripped away was their professional concern, torn from prominence were their promotions and IRAs.  They became heralds of the coming of the Son of God.  (If we were so bold at proclaiming what we know people would wonder as well!)  When we, too, see our professions, not as self-definers, but as stages on which to discover and then proclaim our eternal hope, then in our hearts, too, will be born the Son of God.

Mary, once again, offers us great wisdom, the one who ponders all these things in her heart.  She quietly opens the present and is amazed.  She does not define herself as the Mother of God.  (The Church would do that later and rightly so.)  She was just taken up with the great mystery and drama of it all!  She does not measure how good a mother she is.  (We do that, mother, or father, or clerk or banker or soldier.)  She just ponders these things in her heart.  She is not concerned with the ignominy of giving birth in a stable.  (We are the ones so taken up with circumstances.)  She just gives birth to the Son of God and plays host with equal grace to shepherds and Wise Men alike.

The Great Hall

I'd been there before, but the sheer size of the place still overwhelms me.  You see its towers dwarfing the city around it as you approach through the narrow, medieval lanes.  It's easy to forget what century it is until you see the ads for cell phone service in the windows of 17th century buildings.  But even so there is an eerie feeling of having been on a long, long journey of several generations and finally coming home.  And that home is Canterbury, the religious institution in England with the longest uninterrupted history.  Augustine of Canterbury established it in 597.

In the high middle ages it was a place of pilgrimage, not just for the fact that it is the mother-church of the Anglican Communion, but because it is the site of a church-state conflict gone horribly wrong in the 12th century.  Thomas Becket was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162.  A strong-willed prince of a man, he ran headlong into the strong-willed Henry II over the rights of the church.  Back and forth they went for several years.  At one point Henry is supposed to have said in utter exhasperation, "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?"  Whereapon 4 rogue knights, seeing an opportunity to gain favor with their sovreign, murdered Thomas in the Cathedral.

T. S. Eliot in his artful play on the story called "Murder in the Cathedral" puts these poignant words in Thomas' mouth, "Herein lies the greatest treason, to do the right thing for the wrong reason!"

Thomas' temptation, as Eliot creates it, is, knowing that his death at the hands of the political powers is highly probable, to respond with a humble submission to his fate just as Jesus had done--proving himself thereby more honorably humble than the recalcitrant king!  Poignant words because in a sense they resound throughout this ancient church even to this day.

In doing interviews, my son Landon and I found that most of the people there had not come as pilgrims.  Many of them were not even religious.  They came out of an interest in history, to see this thing everyone talks about, to see ancient architecture, to wonder at the hoary halls.  They came, doing the right thing, but for utterly the wrong reasons!  We resorted to asking people if they had come for religous reasons before asking for an interview!

In another more sublte way Canterbury does the right thing for the wrong reason.  The Nave walls are lined almost continuously from back to front on both sides with large marble slab monuments to military accomplishments around the world in the name of the English Crown.  Some of them had only oblique references to God, a few had none at all.  These seem to culminate a thread of thought that goes back all the way to the 14th century Black Prince.  Edward of Woodstock was the eldest son of Henry III and would have become King except that he died a year before his father.  He was an exceptional military leader of the English against the French, especially at Crecy and Poitiers (the French would obviously emphasize "black" rather than "prince.")  He became very popular because of this and is burried in the Cathedral.  Until the recent act of parliamant that allows a non-Anglican to assume the British throne, there has always been a blurry line between issues of state and issues of church, matters of earth and matters of heaven.  To do the right thing for the wrong reason...

But under all that confusion is the Undercroft.  Down there the hoary ages still hang in the air.  Ancient columns still seem to echo the chants of the Benedictine monks who have worshipped there through the centuries.  Modern monuments to social justice issues feel strangely at home with the peeling smoke of distant candles.  Here somehow, the undercurrent of the Spirit is still flowing, deep and cool and strong.  Perhaps this foundation is the key to this church's longevity after all.....

Altruism is officially DEAD!

An add on TV this morning showed a couple of ribbons marking out a Christmas gift (mind you, this is still pre-Thanksgiving.)  A gift card of the kind afixed to such packages appears in the intersection of the ribbons and the words, "To:" and "From:" magically appear on it.  Then between the two words in italicized letters these words write themselves:  "Get a wow from everyone!"  Texas Lotto tickets sprout from behind the card like magic.

Like magic we now give in order to get--to get a wow.  It's not in the giving, it's in the getting.  And the ones who get the most are the people who profit from the Texas Lotto, and the people who lose are the ones who can't afford to buy the tickets but do anyway.

It's official.  Altruism is dead!

Thanksgiving is Remembering

When Israel entered the Promised Land God warned them:  "Do not forget."

Do not forget!  When your wealth increases, and your power increases, and your satisfaction with life increase, do not forget where it all came from.  Do not forget the provision of God in the wilderness, for the abundance of the Promised Land comes from the same generous hands.  Gratitude is the fruit of a good memory.

It behooves us, therefore, to remember where our bounty comes from.  Take, for example, what is going to weigh our tables down this afternoon.  Let's start with the centerpiece of it all, the turkey.

Contrary to popular belief, turkey is not manufactured in the back rooms of the HEB store.  Turkey actually comes from a farm.  The farm got the turkey from a breeder.  The breeder got the turkey eggs from breeder hens and toms, who ultimately got their original turkeys from a Native American who had the turkeys as domesticated birds.  The Native Americans got the turkeys from the woods, which is ultimately where all our turkeys come from.  When you sit down to carve the great bird remember that it is a fruit of this North American continent on which we live.

Let's go to the dressing.  Now, there are two kinds of dressing, and they take us two different places.  There is bread dressing, which is wheat based.  The wheat comes from farms in the northwest, cultivated by huge machines they used to call tractors, but now look more like monstrous transformer toys.  They plant sections and sections of wheat that produce enough to feed the world.  But wheat was originally domesticated in the Fertile Crescent 11,000 years ago or so.  When you spoon out your dressing remember that it is the fruit of the cradle of civilization, come to us from half a world away.

Then there is cornmeal dressing.  Corn is also one of those early grains, it is the most widely produced cereal grain in the western hemisphere.  It was domesticated in central America, probably about the same time as wheat.  Remember that when you shovel in that wonderful cornmeal dressing you are receiving a gift from southern Mexico.

And then there are the spices.  Spices span the globe.  Literally thousands of herbs and spices go into our foods from every corner of the earth.  Most of the spices we use in dressing come from Italy and around the northern Mediterranean.  When you taste their subtle flavors remember to give thanks in Italian!

Mashed potatoes come from us not from either Idaho or Ireland.  They come to us from Peru.  When Landon and I were in Lima last summer we went to an open air market.  I asked one lady in a stall to tell me about all the potato varieties she had for sale.  She quickly ran through at least a dozen and apologized because there were so many more she did not have for sale!  When you drown your mashed potatoes in gravy remember the high mountain air of the Andes and give thanks to the Incas.

I could go on.  Green beans were first bred by Calvin Keeney in Le Roy, New York in 1894.  Pumpkin is a product of Native American horticulture of the eastern seaboard.  Pumpkin Pie originated when colonists cut off the top of pumpkins, scooped out the seeds, filled them with milk, spices and honey and roasted them over hot coals.  And the full feeling—it  comes when the sugar in your blood reaches thresholds that tell your glandular system to stimulate you to stop eating!

Our Thanksgiving bounty comes to us from literally everywhere.   It comes from places of origin around the globe, it comes from the dawn of civilization to just a hundred years ago.  In a sense, when your "remembering" goes back this far, it catches up all of creation, and places it beautifully on your table, thanks to the incredible bounty of the One who created it all in the first place.

There is another time when we do the same thing.  When we gather around the table of the Lord each Sunday we recognize the bounty of the Lord in our creation and redemption, and we make "Eucharist," we give thanks.  Every meal in your house is a shadow of the Great Meal we celebrate here.

Let us eat, then, and be thankful!

Sheeply and Goatly

Last Sunday after Pentecost, November 20, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Killeen, TX

Sheep and Goats…sheep get to go to heaven, goats have to go to the other place.  I'm so glad I'm a sheep…..

Isn't that the meaning of this passage?  That's how we normally think about it, right?  The sheep are the people who are saved, who are on their way to heaven, and the goats, well, poor guys, they drove so fast to the ball game that they missed the ticket office.  Sorry, but, that's not me....

 Seems to me that telling the difference between the sheep and the goats is really pretty important, don't you think?  I mean, I know I'm a sheep, and I know you're a sheep, at least.....

The tricky thing is, sheep and goats are sometimes hard to tell apart.  A sheep says, Baaaa...." a goat goes, "Baaaa....."  A sheep eats grass and shrubs, a goat eats grass and shrubs.  Rams have horns and billy goats have horns.  A sheep poops little round black balls, a goat poops little round black balls.  I know what you're thinking:  Sheep have wool and goats don't.  But some sheep don't have wool, and some goats do!  I have a suspicion that if you shaved a sheep and a goat down to the bare skin nobody in here could tell which was which.

But Jesus makes it very clear that there is a huge difference—the difference between heaven and not-so-heaven.  It must be that the differences that matter are not on the outside, but on the inside.  Sheep have 54 chromosomes, goats have 60.  And....oh, yeah, this is a parable, not a biology lesson.  The differences don't really hinge on physical  differences.  They hinge on something else.  It seems they hinge on what sheep do compared to what goats do.

I saw a herd of goats once when I was a kid in Ecuador.  They were feeding along the inside of a narrow draw, nibbling whatever they could find.  It was a sandy draw with steep sides, and some goats found a little ledge with some grass on it.  They promptly formed a line and moved down this ledge eating everything to the ground.  But the ledge got narrower and narrower until finally, to maintain footing, they were leaning against the wall beside them.  Finally, it gave out completely.  The first goat jumped up on his back legs and spun around to face the next goat square on, and pushed by and forced him off the ledge!

 I've never seen a heard of sheep do that.

Sheep and goats really are different.  Goats are smarter than sheep.  They think about things and work the angles on them,  they try and push and get ahead by their own incessant will, like in the Old Testament reading when God says He'll judge against the ones that push with shoulder and flank and butt the weak ones and keep them from the grass and water.  Goats are smart enough to think they can figure it out by themselves.  Goats, for the purposes of this parable, are willful.  The goats in Jesus' parable did all the things that the sheep did, but they did them willfully, not willingly.  They fed the hungry and clothed the naked and visited the prisoner and tended the sick because they could manage a personal advantage out of it.  They did not do it "for the least of these, my brothers."  They did not meet the Lord in the face of the weak.  They met their own ambition.

Sheep, on the other hand, are lost without a shepherd.  European explorers in the 14th - 18th centuries had a habit of releasing goats on deserted islands and returning later for a stock of meat.  All it took was a billy and a couple of nannies,  And a year later there would be 46  of them!  Cabrito for supper!  It was so successful that in many places their descendents have become a plague that costs millions of dollars to control.

They didn't release sheep.  If they came back a year later for sheep all they would have found were fat coyotes, all dressed in Armani wool.  The only exception was New Zealand, that, at European contact, hosted no land-based predators.  It is the only place in the world where the natural environment is so benign that there is actually a population of feral sheep! 

So sheep, for the purposes of this parable, are willing rather than willful.  They do what they are led to do, the go where they are led to go, and they thrive only when under good care.

There are two very important differences between willfulness and willingness that are important for us this morning.  First, whereas the willful are often well provisioned, only the willing are grateful.  There are people who still say, “Give my hard-earned money to the church!  Are you kidding?”  “Charity begins at home, I take care of my own.”  “I'm a self-made person, I deserve what I've got.”  It is an attitude of pushing ahead, of forging one's own way, of working the angles.  It's willful and it is goatly.

On the other hand, the sheep looks at the pasture it didn't make, and the stream it didn't channelize or dam, and the shepherd standing watch, and is full of gratitude.  This is willing and it is sheeply.

This morning we are bringing in our pledge cards.  This is a sheeply action, full of gratitude, willing to do what is right in the face of the needs of the Kingdom.  And I'll give you the bottom line.  10% registers in God's books as "full gratitude."  My wife and I tithe to the church, and then give elsewhere as well.  It can be done,  How grateful are you?  How willing?

Secondly, whereas both the willful and the willing are surprised, only the willing are pleasantly so.  The goat who is always working the angles is surprised when his efforts to control the other goats fail.  I know, because I've been there myself!  You find yourself trying not to say things like. “"Don't be such a horn-head, that patch of daisies is for Grass-breath over here!"  And, "Oops, ledge ran out, careful, I’m comin' back through!"  Sooner or later our willfulness proves inadequate to the challenges of life, leaving our goat-hood in a considerable crisis.

On the other hand, the willing depend on the greater vision and wisdom of the Shepherd.  When things don't go as expected, it's OK.  Thomas Merton, on the drive to the Monastery at Gethsemane, Kentucky, writes that he was incredibly aware of two things within.  On the one hand an overpowering desire to enter the monastery, and on the other a complete peace if for some reason he were not accepted.  Iif he had been rejected his plan was to join the Army.  The willing steps onto the green pasture and says, “Wow, this is incredible!  The shepherd must love me so!  I wonder what is coming next?”

“I wonder what is coming next?” expresses a sense of expectancy, whose personal work is not to bring about the surprise, but to be as quiet and attentive as possible so as not to miss it when it comes!  Today is not only Thanksgiving Sunday, Christ King Sunday, Parish Meeting and Parish Thanksgiving Meal, it is also the last Sunday in the Season after Pentecost, and the last Sunday before the beginning of Advent.  (Yes, the year has shot by us like a patriot missile!)

Our theme during Advent this year will be "Expectancy, Preparing for the Great Surprise."  Next week we will introduce a little meditation aid that will help you build that sense of expectancy during Advent, and assist that willing sheep-hood within.

Yes, I can be a sheep, and you can be one, too.  By loving one another and the needy of the world for Him as He has asked us to, with humble and open hearts, our wonderful surprise will be to see him in the very faces of the ones we love on His behalf.

Ordeal

In north Wales, along the coast, there is a little town called Holywell.  It gets its name from a legend that dates from the 7th century about a beautiful young woman named Fride.  The name is the Welsh version of "Brigid," as in St. Brigid of Ireland, and harks even to pre-Christian days when the goddess Brigid watched over the hearth, the family and the flocks.

Fride of Wales was born to a pagan chief and a Christian mother.  She was baptized into her mother's faith and as she grew the call to become a nun grew apace within her.  But her beauty was desired by a neighboring prince, Caradog.  One day as she was in the field he found her and sought to have his way with her.  She resisted, and fled toward the church where her uncle, Beuno, was saying Mass.  When he saw that his intentions were frustrated Caradog flew into a rage, drew his sword and cut Fride's head off.

Beuno heard the commotion and came outside the church. He at once took in what happened and cursed Cardog, who melted into a mist and sank into the ground.  He then scooped Fride's severed head and placed it again on her body.  She was revived to life, became a nun and lived out her days in convents in the area.  Where her hed hit the ground a spring erputed, and it soon became a place of pilgrimage and a site of healing.  Beuno took to washing daily in the spring, standing on a certain stone.  The prefix "wini" was added to Fride's name, which means "Glorious," and the site became known as Winifred's Well.  Depictions of Winifred always show a hairline scar around her neck, something she is purported to have had to her dying day.

In the 14th century a shrine was built, and the spring was encased in a stone frame in the shape of a star.  From there the water runs out into a large pool about four feet deep.  The water is fresh out of the ground and is very cold.  Beuno's stone is fixed to the bottom of the pool.  People come from all around to seek healing.  They walk around the perimeter of the pool three times saying the rosary, and then they dip themselves in the frigid water three times standing on Beuno's stone.  It may sound superstitious to our ears, but the pile of crutches left behind by those who have been healed is testimony to a greater reality.

Landon and I watched people come and endure the cold-water ordeal--and it is an ordeal!  I sat for a time with my legs dangling in the water. Within minutes my toes were aching and numb.  It was obvious that it took more desire for divine help than for creature comforts to complete the discipline.  Their faces were supplicant and patient, hopeful and supremely humble.

One young couple came with their two children, a boy of about 10 and another of about 2.  The little one was in a stroller, and he had his arm in a sling.  Obvously the parents had come to seek healing for the little boy.  Instinctively I asked his name.  "Paddy," they said.  I knelt down, made the sign of the crosss on his forehead, blessed him and prayed for his healing.  When I looked up mother and father and friends were looking at me with wide and expectant eyes.  Would I bless them, too?  "I'm Anglican, not Catholic," I protested, but that meant nothing to them at that moment.  I went down the line pronouncing a blessing on each one, and receiving 100-fold in return myself.

These peoples' faith looked a bit different than mine and may be less educated than mine, but in many ways they put me to shame!