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Where were you and what were you doing, 20 years ago?

In August 2006, two of my clergy colleagues were in college: Keith starting his freshman year, and Josh, his senior year, while also working as a bouncer at Swallow at the Hollow. Anna was working for Sprint/Nextel and discerning a call to ordained ministry in the Diocese of Southern Virginia. David was in Washington, D.C., serving as the Head of the Upper School at St. Albans School. I, like Josh, was here in Baltimore, directing a summer and after school program at Living Classrooms Foundation, and discerning a call to ordained ministry, like Anna.

What about you? Where were you, and what were you doing, 20 years ago?

And 20 years ago, we held our first contemporary music service here at Redeemer.

Back then, it was called “Faith Under Construction”, and its tagline was “Rooted. Relevant. Real.” They first began meeting weekly in the Parish Hall, using a PowerPoint slide presentation instead of a bulletin.

As Robert Chrystal, our director of contemporary music, who was invited back then by associate rector Rev. Chuck Messer to lead the music, remembers:

“The service was much more free-flowing than the Faith@Five liturgy we know today. Selected elements of the Episcopal liturgy were used, particularly the Eucharist, but even that was abridged. Contemporary music and a willingness to experiment were central to this new Saturday community.”

Over the past 20 years, the service has changed and grown. We now worship in the church (and sometimes, in the chapel) not the Parish Hall, and we use bulletins and not a PowerPoint. Our Connections Choir, in addition to singing at our Saturday services, will also lead sing-a-longs with Robert from time to time after the service, featuring different styles of music (like Gospel) or the music of different artists (like the Beatles).

The ethos and spirit of Faith@Five continues to be “come as you are”. Clergy typically don’t vest when we serve at 5 p.m. on Saturdays; the environment is low-key and informal. And so often, at that time of day, the light streaming in through the stained-glass window behind the altar is just stunning, filling the sacred space with an ethereal glow.

Here at Redeemer, whether you come at 5 p.m. Saturday, or at 8 a.m. or 10 a.m. on Sunday, during the announcements and before communion, you will hear one of the clergy say, “This is God’s table. Wherever you are on your journey of faith, you are welcome.”

I imagine over the past 20 years, you too have changed and grown. I imagine you have celebrated joys and endured heartbreak and loss. Know that wherever you are on your journey of faith, and whatever roads you have traveled, you are indeed welcome here at Redeemer.

Love,
Cristina

Dear Folks,

“The boundary of sleep is an ocean, [and] our dreams the waves that interconnect [us],” writes Edward Bruce Bynum in “Families and the Interpretation of Dreams,” which offers particularly good news in these balkanized times. Even if we are divided in our waking lives, the realm of the collective unconscious unites us. Indeed, the work of Spirit is to un-divide systems and individuals, to invite integration of every kind in every way it can be imagined.

Bynum’s work centers on the dreams that people share, especially among and between the members of a family. He shares predictive dreams that anticipate a personal event, prophetic dreams that may have an impact or bearing on a community, visitation dreams that feature deceased family members, and the appearance in dreams of existing relatives who report having the same dream as the dreamer.

His book is grounded in “what all of us have roots in: some form of family life and a nightly dream cycle.” He addresses individuals who are interested in seeing how their own lives are reflected in their dreams, and interestingly, how their lives are reflected in the dreams of others. Because we live in an intimate web of family and self, our dreams understandably take their images from that web of relationships. So, Bynum invites the “awakened” dreamer to not only understand the images the dreams present, but to wonder how their images can heal both the dreamer and her system(s).

“The collective dreams of ancient peoples are expressed and lived through their myths,” Bynum writes. So he locates the origins of modern dream work, not in Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung (whose work he connects to the “ice caves of Europe!”), but much further back, to the sunny, generative delta of Egypt, which he calls the African cradle. Because humanity initially evolved on the African continent, the “deepest and oldest aspect” of our collective narrative is rooted there, as is the birth of human consciousness.

He coins a term “personalism” to convey the ancient, African experience of integration: of individual with group, the material with the spiritual, the living with the dead, and finds modern manifestations in Voodoo, the Christian communion of saints in which the dead have commerce with the living, and the goals of psycho-spiritual work. Instead of merely reacting to a dream, the dreamer is taught to take ownership of the dream, and approach the beings, forces, and situations within it “as an active presence” in the dreamer’s life. In dreamwork, ritual and ceremony, the “ancestors” still live and offer a pathway to healing.

Bynum concludes with this powerful image:

“Death is the escarpment between realm and realm, the dream [is] the bird that flies from each to each, ignorant of the illusion and boundary we keep during the waking state. This is how we keep the dead in our memory. This is how, near our own death, we become lucid, take flight, and are greeted in luminosity by the dead.”

“And so we dream into the dream of matter and energy beyond our human dreaming until all mind and boundary are completely dissolved and transcended and we dream ourselves into the infinite lifeblood of God.”

Dreams are rooted in human imagination, and our ability to imagine is what enables us to have empathy for others. I can never walk in your shoes, but I can be curious about the load you carry, what your shoulders and heart feel like, and how your feet may hurt. So it is true that our dreams seek to un-divide us, to acquaint us with each other and our own deepest selves, and to invite us to the source of Being where all of us dwell.

Love, David

I recently came across a poem by Mary Oliver called “Just as the Calendar Began to Say Summer.”  It’s great and is really speaking to my experience of summer this year.  She laments that just as she’s starting to forget and “heal” from the memorizing of multiplication tables, learning how to be “successful”, and making sure to always produce results; she finds herself at summer’s end, “summoned back to the chalky rooms and the desks,” trying to hold onto the memories of how “the river kept rolling its pebbles, the way the wild wrens sang though they hadn’t a penny in the bank, the way the flowers were dressed in nothing but light.”

As I wade into the waters at St. Paul’s, I’m reminded a bit of the magic of summer. Wandering through empty school buildings, I can almost feel the way these walls are resting, breathing, renewing themselves as they await the return of students and teachers, shouts and gasps, lessons and promptings, laughs and tears, cheers and jeers.

I imagine our teachers and students as well.  Some have traveled to other continents while others have poured themselves into summer jobs.  Some have muddied their boots on many a trail while others have set new records on video games and streaming platforms.  Many have allowed themselves to be enchanted by the mystery of the world about them.  I hope that to some degree they and I have all found a bit of renewal, rest, and healing.

The pattern of the school year taking its rest during the summer months provides a great metaphor for our lives.  There are times that are heavily packed with frantic energy and a seemingly endless list of to-dos.  There are times that feel effortless, organic, natural, and unburdened.  There are cloudy, sad, and confusing times, and there are times that are bright, clear, and defining.

What Mary Oliver’s poem is telling me, in this season, is to be sure to celebrate the pebbles dancing in the river while they’re dancing.  I want to be so present to the goodness, the beauty, and the eternal of this moment right now, so that when things pick up and get a little crazy, when the rooms get chalky, I can spiritually go back to the well of pebbles dancing in the river and be renewed once again, almost just as much as if my feet were still in the river, and I was still breathing easy, deep, and healing breaths.

What are the pebbles dancing in the river for you?  Where do you find rest, renewal, and healing?  How can you store these moments up so that you can go back to them, just like a spiritual well, to draw some more of that same rest, renewal, and healing?

Love,
Josh

Dear members and friends of Redeemer,

Earlier this week, I was helping a parishioner update their funeral plans. Scriptural readings. Altar flowers. Hymns. Ushers. All the things we put off for a later date, because thinking about no longer being here on earth is not something that makes us particularly warm and fuzzy. But it is an integral part of our faithfulness, both to ourselves and to those we leave behind.

There is a kind of clarity that comes from naming what you want said over you, what hymns should carry your family through that hour, what scripture should be read into a room full of emotions. Despite how morbid it might feel, it is stewardship.

The Psalmist prayed, “So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). I think of funeral planning as one small way we practice that numbering. Not because we know when our days will end, but because naming our mortality out loud, on paper, in conversation with a priest, is itself an act of wisdom. It takes something we would rather not look at and puts it in the light.

While looking through funeral documents, I found the late Rev. Robert “Bob” P. Patterson’s (Redeemer’s eighth rector) write-up on his own funeral suggestions. He began this way:

“For years I have helped grieving spouses and/or children plan a funeral or memorial service, and know the strain and bewilderment which sometimes add to their burden as they try to do what they think or hope the deceased person wanted. Also, for years I have counseled and taught people to write down suggestions they hope will be honored, and when this has occurred, the relief and gratitude of the family is obvious.”

Rev. Bob had seen both sides up close, in this same parish, long before I arrived: the bewilderment of families left to become detectives of their loved one’s wishes, and the relief of those who did not have to. That is the burden a funeral plan lifts.

Making a funeral plan ahead of time is an opportunity to think through what matters most and how those things evolve over a lifetime – and gives you the opportunity to review and revise as your life changes. What mattered to you at forty may not be what matters at seventy. The hymn you would have chosen in grief for a parent may not be the hymn you want sung over you now. A plan is not a monument. It can change as you change. That is part of its gift.

It does not solve the immediate pain a family feels. But it does offer them a balm: one less thing to guess at, one less “I think this is what they would have wanted” spoken through tears. It lets a family grieve without also having to piece together, in the space of a few days, a celebration of an entire life.

Sometime in the first half of the program year, be on the lookout for a Redeemer funeral planning seminar. In the meantime, if you would like to meet and think through your funeral plans, I or any of the clergy, along with Bert Landman, would be happy to meet with you. Write down what matters. You can always revise it later. What you leave behind is not only a list of hymns and readings. It is a comforting and thoughtful gift to your loved ones designed to meet them precisely when they most need it.

Blessings,

Keith+