Season of Dazzling Darkness

Praying Up the Moment

by the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow

A few days ago I was riding my mountain bike in the State Park land around Louisville Swamp, south and west of Chaska. As I came up a particularly steep hill, the land around me opened up, and I found myself in a big open field, with tall grass waving toward the next hillside, and clumps of oaks with deeply seamed bark and dark glossy leaves standing at irregular intervals. It must have been a farm field once, I thought: cleared for crops long ago, with the oaks left in as windrows between fields, now gone to grass but not entirely to prairie. As I looked around the field, it seemed as if each element in the landscape drew together in a simple harmony—grass, oaks, the contour of the hill, the blue sky, the puffy white clouds in the lazy wind—and suddenly I had an intense feeling of the beauty of the moment. I felt a deep goodness in the life of the field around me; I felt a deep goodness in the physical exertion and muscular joy of riding my bicycle up the hill and down the path; I felt a deep goodness in the strange and mysterious fact that, as a human being in the midst of nature, I was able to see the beauty and feel the goodness and give expression to the joy.

In this moment of joyful beauty, I thought three things: My first thought was, “God this is beautiful!” My second thought was, “God,

thank you for creating this beauty and for giving me eyes of the spirit to see it.” My third thought was, “God, take up this joy I feel right now and share it with the people who need it the most.”

My particular beliefs and practices are shaped by a style of theology known as process theology. One of the things we say in process theology is that God shares all our feelings with us, exactly as we feel them. God does not merely observe us from without, watching us, as it were, on a big TV screen in the sky, as we feel happy or sad or bountiful or lost; but God the Holy Spirit dwells within us, and takes up into God’s own self all our feelings as and how and when we feel them. God knows us better than we know ourselves—and God’s feeling of us becomes part of how God feels the entire world.

Another tenet of process theology is that God works in the world by empowering the world to participate in its own creation. God creates us to be co-creators. God takes up all the feelings of all the creatures, and out of these feelings God fashions new possibilities for the next round of feelings to be felt. As process theologian Marjorie Suchocki puts it, “God works with the world as it is, to call the world to what it can become.” Since my feelings are part of the world, my feelings are part of the “raw material” God can use to make new moments and create new feelings.

And here’s where it gets interesting: God can see all the ways things in the world connect with each other, even when to us those connections seem distant or tenuous or far-fetched. God knows that bread and wine on an altar are connected with the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, so even if we don’t see it all on Sunday morning, God makes the connection, and we feel the presence of Christ in Eucharist. Even if family or friends are very far away from me in miles or years, God feels the love we still have for each other, and God weaves that love into the possibilities for new feelings God gives us each and every moment.

I believe that intercessory prayer works in that way. When I feel joy or compassion or goodwill for someone, I can offer that feeling up to God. God can take that feeling and weave it into a new possibility for joy or compassion or goodwill, and give that possibility to the one I pray for. My prayer becomes part of the “raw material” God shapes into new possibilities for those for whom I pray.

And that’s what I prayed on my bicycle in the middle of a field on a sunny afternoon a few days ago: that God would take up all the immense joy and beauty I felt in just that moment, and God would connect it with people I cared about, people who needed a little joy in their lives, and God would give them the possibility to feel joy in their world, too. Not that anybody would necessarily know that I was on my bike and I was happy and I was thinking of them—prayer is usually more “anonymous” than that—but I asked that God would let some people know there was real joy in the world, and they could feel some of that joy themselves. I think we do that for each other in our prayers all the time, and that many of our moments of gift and grace come because God connects us with the feelings of those who pray for us. Perhaps my sudden moment of joy came to me because someone was praying for me just then. And then I prayed my joy on to someone else. And on and on it goes, in an ever-flowing stream of prayer and love.

Take a moment now and offer your feelings to God, to be woven into new possibilities for yourself and for those you love. Pray up this moment—and God will make more of it than we could ask or imagine.

Sunday Schedule Changed for August
by the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow

During the month of August, we will gather on Sunday mornings for a single worship service, The Holy Eucharist, Rite II , with music at 9:00 a.m.

There are a couple of reasons for this change. The first is that on the first Sunday of August, August 3, there will be a large celebration of the Holy Eucharist as part of General Convention. It is a rare and wonderful opportunity to see thousands of Episcopalians at worship together, and many people from St. George’s will want to be at the Convention Center on that Sunday to be a visible part of the larger church. While I didn’t want to cancel services entirely on August 3, it seemed like a good idea to have a smaller gathering here, so that we might also have a larger gathering there.

But changing Sunday, August 3 got me to thinking about summer schedules in general. I’ve often thought that changing the schedule for summer is just an inconvenience to everyone: we spend months building up habits and patterns of church participation, and then summer comes and messes everything up! It hardly seems worth the bother. But several

people from both the 8:00 and 10:00 services, shared with me in conversations that it would be fun to see people from the “other” service, it would make a nice change for the summer to shake up the routine a little , it would be a treat for the 8 o’clockers to have some music, it would be fun for the 10 o’clockers to get out of church earlier and have more time for the picnic or the beach or the pool.

So let’s give it a try! During August, we will meet as one big parish family for one big service of word and sacrament and fellowship and song. Check the calendar for revised lector and chalice bearer lists. See people you don’t usually get to see in church. Visit with folks at coffee hours with whom you don’t usually get to see in church. Visit with folks at coffee hour with whom you don’t normally get to visit. Have fun with something new—after all, it’s summer!