These weeks leading up to Advent have been difficult ones for me on a personal level.  Death has intervened in these last days.

A few weeks ago, a dear friend, the wife of one of my closest bishop friends, was taken to the hospital in critical condition.  She had been ill for some time.  Still, this development took us all be surprise.  She lingered at the door between life and death for nearly two weeks, finally entering eternity in what I’m certain was an act of courage and compassion for her family the day before Thanksgiving.  God grant you peace, Anne.

My college chaplain, who was a moral giant, once wrote a column for the newspaper about Thanksgiving.  I have always admired it.  In it he observed the obscenity of celebrating a feat of thankfulness in a world where people were starving for the lack of the very thing for which we were giving thanks.  I thought he made a lot of moral sense.  Not everyone took to his prophetic words happily.  I remember one student, amidst with tears, complaining that he had ruined Thanksgiving that year.

It is the week of All Saints.  All Hallows’ Eve is Tuesday.  All Saints’ Day is Wednesday.  All Souls’ Day is Thursday.  Most of us will celebrate on Sunday.  It began for me, though, when Sophie Lynn Sauls, child of God and Ginger’s and my first grandchild, made her anxiously-awaited entrance into the world yesterday. 

In Anglican tradition All Saints Day is properly a baptismal day.  With that in mind and with loving thoughts of the entry of this new saint into the world, I share with you a poem a good friend shared with me on the day of Sophie’s birth.

Shortly before I left for a planned trip for a trip to see my son Andrew and daughter-in-law Jessica in Lexington last Wednesday, I received some very welcome news.  My wife Ginger, who was already in Lexington, called to say that Jessica was in labor.  I literally wept at the thought that the long-awaited granddaughter might be there by the time I landed or at least soon afterward.  Not yet it turns out.  False alarm. 

So we continue to wait.  It is hard on Ginger and me, but it is a thousand times harder on Jessica and Andrew.  Waiting.  Patience.  These are things I’ve never been good at.  Sophie is already teaching me to see them in a new way.  For one thing, I have come to see Moses in a new way.

I like it when my cousin Jeanne comes to visit.  She is an awfully creative person to begin with, and New York brings it out gloriously.  Just to wake up in New York gets the creative juices flowing, and it is awfully fun to watch her get excited about all the city has to offer.  You can just see it all stirring inside her from morning to night, breathing it all in.

Not surprisingly, Jeanne loves New York, too.  But she does not love the subway.  She is from a small town.  It is a small down where both she and I learned Southern manners, things like always standing and offering your seat to a lady.  It was also a small town where just coming to New York at all is considered a dangerous enough thing to do without going down into the ground with God knows who to catch a train heading off into a tunnel.  In fact, before we moved here, Jeanne avoided the subway altogether, opting instead for cabs and an occasional bus.  Since coming to visit us, though, Jeanne has ventured, albeit somewhat reluctantly, into the subway.  After all, her New York cousin knows the ropes.

I grew up being taught that Catholics were idolatrous.  Why?  Because they had statues in their churches.  That was enough.  To tell you the truth, I think it was mostly a defense mechanism to being in the religious minority, Methodist in an overwhelmingly Catholic community.  Methodists do not have statues in their churches.   

And then, lo and behold, I became an idolater, too, at least partly.  I became an Episcopalian, which seemed to my family an awful lot like Catholic.  It is not even uncommon to find statues in our churches.  I think my family had to resort to distinguishing between statuary in good taste (by which they meant English in nature) and statuary in poor taste (by which they meant inexpensive).

There was a law at our house when I was a child.  Gifts were to be acknowledged with thank you notes.  The only exception was if you were there to say “thank you” in person, and even that concession was given reluctantly.  I always had a particular dislike for this rule, and sad to say in retrospect, I’m not sure I did a very good job passing it on to my children. 

Writing thank you notes is no fun.  It is a chore, plain and simple.  The only way to make it bearable at all in my experience is to write a “form” letter and just copy it over and over inserting a description of the gift in the appropriate place.  Sure, it sounds insincere, and it is, but it complied with the law.  You’ve got to be careful about this strategy, though, just in case the givers, often related, compare notes. 

This week’s readings are rich in material worthy of reflection.  Here’s the part that strikes me:

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, . . . [who] emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. (Phil. 2:1-5, 6a)

It seems to me we in the United States have badly lost sight of this vision, if indeed we ever had it, of what it is to lead, to serve one another.  It is not a solely American failure.  It is just basically human failure.  The antidote is also just basically human.  It is compassion. 

The lectionary provides alternative Old Testament readings each week.  This week’s have a similar theme—God’s generosity.

The first option (Isa. 16:2-15) is the story of the Israelites complaining against Moses and Aaron for the hard circumstances they are facing in the wilderness.  “If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”  (v. 3)  God’s response is to shower the people with generosity, although not necessarily joyously.  Instead, God’s generosity will be a test.  How will the people respond to what God has done?

Sometimes St. Paul strikes me as someone who does not have much experience in life.  Maybe it’s that he was never married.

This week’s reading from the Letter to the Romans is a case-in-point.  In it, Paul writes, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”  I have yet to experience, to say nothing of have, love that does no wrong.  I don’t expect to.  At least not in this lifetime.