All Saints Day

 All Saints Day

St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church David Sanger

Guest Writer: Karen Dubert

All Saints’ Day: a Crowd of Saints  2020

 “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation.”— Rev 7:9.

My solitude of social distance is suddenly congested

by reminders of the great cloud:

that crowd of witnesses huddled over there in eternity,

peering into time

from vast margins of timelessness,

voids of space.

How is it that we eternal beings—

embedded in time,

prehistoric insects in amber—

How is it we so obsess over the amber

that we imagine ourselves the focus?

We sing of saints “who from their labours rest”

possibly imagining

eternity as an endless “rest" of watching us—

Dreary infinitude.

This amber chamber in which we live and move and be

confounds, imprisons us

defining our vision

regulating our expression;

so we envision the ancestors of millennia

eagerly peering over each other’s shoulders

to catch glimpses of us—

“the living ones”

The irony catches in my throat,

a log hung up on the flotsam of a cosmic flood.

That our amber-vision defines us

rather than enabling us

to gaze beyond and marvel that

out of here, somewhere

amberlessness means

movement.

(revised 2 Nov 2021)

Karen Dubert

Grace Chapter Daughters of the King at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock, will lead a prayer vigil on Election Day, November 3, 2026. The chapel at Saint Mark’s will be open for prayers from 8:30 a.m. after Morning Prayer to 5:00 p.m.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Gibran: On Children, Steady Bow, Smorgasbord

Gibran: On Children, steady Bow, Smorgasbord

“Your children are not your children.

You may give them your love, but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.”

  — Khalil Gibran, “On Children” in The Prophet (1923).

Gibran’s poem may offer some of the best advice on relating to our children. Parents are to be the steady or stable “bow.” Our children do not belong to us. They are the most treasured guests we will ever have in our home.

phyllis raney

Another piece of wisdom came from a counselor, Phyllis Raney, who led a parenting class at our church. She told us our job was to provide the best smorgasbord of experiences for our children to sample. What they choose, however, is up to them. We are to be the best possible providers of opportunities for them to experience, but we cannot control their decisions about what they choose.

promises to Peter

We have three children, and as parents, we led busy lives as physicians at a children’s hospital. We wondered how to give each of our children quality one-on-one time. At the birth of our second child, my mother-in-law, Elizabeth, gave me a book, Promises to Peter (Word Books, 1974), by Charlie Shedd. We read about taking each child out to dinner one night a week. We let the child choose the restaurant, within reason. So, one night a week, usually Monday, was “date night” with one of our children. It was a gift to focus on letting that child tell their story without distractions and to show how much we loved them. 

We also attended many medical meetings each year and tried to bring one child with us, hoping to spend quality one-on-one time. These trips were one more offering on the smorgasbord.

Our children are older now, with their own children. It is easier to be the steady bow.

The steady bow image has now also become a symbol of our relationship with God. First, we learned about it as we tried to raise our children. Now, it is teaching us more about how God cares for us. The smorgasbord has become a symbol of the innumerable ways God provides for us. We learn more about this One who loves both “the arrows and the stable bow.”

Joanna    https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Gerald May: Willingness and Surrender

Gerald May V: Willingness and Surrender

Return of the Prodigal Son, Bishop’s Garden National Cathedral. ‍ ‍

“The gentlest form of spiritual narcissism is the belief that one can achieve one’s own spiritual growth. ‘I can do it.’”—Gerald G. May, Will and Spirit (HarperOne, 1982), p. 115.

In Will and Spirit, Gerald May writes about the struggles in our world today and the many battles within ourselves. We will likely face issues with will, willingness, control, and surrender in our spiritual lives. As we begin our spiritual journey with willingness, the moment we notice spiritual growth, we become vulnerable to spiritual narcissism: the unconscious use of spiritual practices to inflate our self-importance. We try to become holy, assuming we can accomplish our own spiritual growth. This becomes willfulness masquerading as willingness.

When we recognize our self-interest in participating in charitable works, our actions and gifts will be given and received more effectively. But sin occurs when self-image and personal willfulness become so vital that one forgets, represses, or denies one’s absolute connectedness and grounding in the God within us, the power who creates and sustains the cosmos and who placed that yearning within us. 

May encourages us to let attachments come and go rather than constantly clinging to them. We must be aware of our need for self-importance; thus, he cautions us against immediately leaping to shore ourselves up. He places less emphasis on coping and mastery and more on waking up to whatever is happening in the present moment.

As we surrender some of our self-importance, we make friends with mystery. Even if we do not always find God when we sacrifice our self-importance, May believes that as we lose our need for self-importance, we realize that God has already found us. We will experience more spontaneity and awareness when we are not driven to perform, and when we can let things flow without needing to be defined by self-judgment or evaluation of our own actions.  

May reminds us that spirituality cannot be a means to an end for our discomfort.

Spiritual growth must be a way into life, not an escape from it. God calls us to be in the world, not of it. Unfortunately, this side of the world may be uncomfortable.

I share this familiar statue of the Return of the Prodigal Son in the Bishop’s Garden at the National Cathedral. It is an icon of surrender and willingness for both the son and the father. They serve as our role models.

Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/