Podcast

Sunday, September 25, 2022

By: David May, Rector

There is a phrase I remember hearing a lot when I was growing up. I heard it from parents in the neighborhood. And I heard it a lot from my mother. Maybe you’ve heard it too. Maybe you’ve even used it yourself. It goes like this: “If you don’t stop [fill in the blank], you’ll put your eye out!” That fill in the blank could be almost anything, sword fighting with sticks, bombing each other with acorns, flinging Matchbox cars over homemade ramps. My mother was a thoroughly reasonable person and was rarely stampeded by emotion, but the number of things that she thought might result in dire consequences to one’s eye was immeasurable.

I think I understand her perspective a little better now after having raised kids of my own. And I’ve also learned that my mother’s use of exaggeration is actually grounded in a very old method of teaching. Hyperbole or exaggeration to make a point, is a perfectly acceptable method of instruction with a long and proud history. The rabbis of Jesus’ own day used it. In this style of teaching – often using stories or examples – one draws clear distinctions between good and evil, righteousness and injustice, darkness and light. These rabbis, and subsequent teachers through the ages, were smart, sophisticated thinkers. They knew as well as anyone that there is infinite complexity and nuances of gray that we deal with in this world. But we can get swamped by all that gray sometimes. Exaggerated storytelling can clarify what’s at stake and get us back on track.

So with my mother, her “put that stick down or it’ll put out your eye” was in a proud tradition. Even though I still might want to counter with an appeal to my general past record of trustworthiness in not having put my eye out to date or my growing desire for more freedom. She knew that I needed to be disarmed first. Complexities could be dealt with later.

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Sunday, September 11, 2022

By: David May, Rector

I think we could be forgiven for getting a little lost in the swirl of events – both near and far – that are going on all at once right now. Though it seemed like she could possibly live forever, Queen Elizabeth II has died and with her death the world has lost a visible, living connection to a much older and different world is gone, and probably more than that has been lost with her passing. Today is also the 21st anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a tragic and traumatic day that changed the world. When I watch the documentaries of that day (which has become almost an annual ritual for me) I still find myself saying, ‘what is happening?!’ in the present tense as if its still happening. Trauma operates like that, leading you back to the feelings you had when it first happened. Psychologists tell us that is because we are trying to get back to that original time and place, like retracing your steps, to find something that you know you’ve lost.

Nearer to home, today is the first nearly normal Kickoff Sunday for us in three years. There are children who the last time we saw them were being carried around in their parents’ arms and who today are walking around just fine on their own. And talking. For the past several months here at church, I’ve seen us try to pick up where we left off before the pandemic with limited success. For starters, that’s because we just lost contact with all of those regular routines and habits that shaped our life before and kept things rolling. So, we’re finding new ones, or trying to.

And nearer still to home, to right here, right now, we’re going to take time to dedicate and bless these new green hangings that are a gift from Georga Williams to the church in loving memory of her mother. We received these hangings from England just before the pandemic and with church closures and all the rest haven’t had the chance to thank God for Agnus Dyson Smith represented by this gift. But this is one dropped stitch that we can go back and pick up.

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