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What do you remember about your first visit to the Church of the Redeemer? Is that memory lost because you grew up here? Were you new to Baltimore, or perhaps new to church going altogether? Maybe you’re a cradle Episcopalian, and you felt at home with the liturgical rhythms. Or you may have felt uncertain when you encountered unfamiliar rituals and music. Were you afraid your children were too noisy and fidgety? Did you wonder if you’d meet someone like you, and if you’d be truly welcomed by those who aren’t like you? Perhaps your introduction to Redeemer occurred outside of worship when you came for a speaker or a special music performance.

Though I’d been to Redeemer for a wedding, a funeral and a Parish Day School event, I ventured here for my first worship service in the summer of 2005 with my husband, George, and our two youngest daughters. We’d been seeking a new church for a year. George and I were raised in different Christian denominations (neither of us was Episcopalian), and we were looking for a church community where we felt welcomed and nourished. Sometimes we visited several different congregations in a month; other times we stayed for a while like Goldilocks, looking for a place that was just right. I found that being a newcomer can be exhausting and intimidating, even among folks who are kind. A friend suggested we try Redeemer because she’d heard good things about its Sunday School and youth program, two of our priorities. Happily, Redeemer was our last visit, though we felt “new” for a while.

As David reminds us each week, newcomers help us know the Holy One in new ways. When we embrace new people in the best ways possible, we enrich our experience and theirs. With that knowledge in mind, a small group of parishioners has met to examine and reimagine what it’s like to be new at Redeemer. We’ve looked at how visitors learn about programming, what happens from their perspective during and after a worship service, what they glean from the website, and what compels them to return. Our guiding question has been: how can we help people connect at Redeemer?

 We think we have some good ideas, we’d like to hear yours, and we hope you’ll join us.

Please become a member of Redeemer’s new Connect Team. If you’ve been here for decades, if you’re new and if you’re somewhere in between, we need you! A few initiatives we have in mind include:

• Connect Team members will be available after each service to meet briefly with visitors
• Connect Team members will coordinate (not have to bring all the food!) monthly Connect Coffees for all parishioners after the 10:00 a.m. service
• Connect Team members will follow up with newcomers
• Connect Team members will be available for speakers and special events

We will host a Connect Coffee after the 10:00 a.m. service on Palm Sunday, April 13. Please email me before then about your interest in joining the Connect Team, or see me there to sign up.

 Lucy Neale Duke
lnealeduke@gmail.com

Dear Folks,

The contemplative mind offers a stark contrast to the ego-centric mind. The small mind, in the words of Richard Rohr, seeks its own advantage, putting its singular good over and against the common good. And as long as one reads reality from this small self, it is impossible to see the whole. The spiritual mind, on the other hand, re-frames existence and offers a different starting point, and because “no problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it,” (Albert Einstein) seeing from this different vantage point offers balance and a path toward our healing. Significantly, this different way of seeing is the promise of religion, and for me the particular promise of Christianity, which I am learning to distinguish from the frame of Christendom.

Christianity is a way of being that conjures the person and teachings of Jesus; Christendom, on the other hand, is a social and political construct. Christendom is, to be frank, materialistic. In a sense it cannot be spiritual, because the concern of Christendom is to shape reality into its image—doctrine, form, belief, institution—rather than to discover in reality the divine that is always and everywhere present, in multiple forms and features and faces. To believe that the holy is everywhere present is to deconstruct the sacred/secular duality, while to insist on that duality is part of the business model of Christendom. It is a kind of prison when one way insists that it is right, but the radical freedom of spirit sets us free.

The non-contemplative mind is mired in dualism: male vs. female, light vs. dark, right vs. wrong, Democrat vs. Republican, good vs. bad. And so we make choices—this is better than that—but we are often making false choices that we then spend loads of energy defending. These false choices and their impact exhaust us, make us defensive and angry, and have a lot to do with where we are in our country today. The false choices of dualism lead us to hate the other, rather than seeing him as someone to be curious about. And we do the same thing to ourselves internally. We demonize or marginalize the parts of ourselves that we reject or are troubled by, instead of engaging our shadow with curiosity.

What if we turn to the part we hate (or most fear) and engage it? Imagine a world in which we welcome the “enemy”… Who are you? What do you most care about? What do you have to teach me? This alternative way is to rediscover the contemplative, the mystical, the non-dual mind, which Rohr calls a “long, loving look at the real.” Love what you see. Don’t analyze it up or down, in or out. This frame invites adoration, thanksgiving, joy, presence: to be a witness to the glory of what or who you encounter.

Love,
David

What follows is a string of recent emails to me and other BUILD leaders, that I have permission to share with you. Fr. Ako is the pastor at Sacred Heart of Jesus in Highlandtown, a sister congregation in BUILD. Elizabeth is lay co-chair of BUILD and member at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church, another sister congregation. Alisa is an organizer with BUILD. Mohamed is a middle-aged man who has lived in the U.S. since he was 4 years old. A refugee from Western Sahara https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/the-western-sahara-conflict-a-fragile-path-to-negotiations/ , Mohamed has always kept his yearly check-in meeting at the Baltimore City office of U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement. For the last 15 years, he has worked with children with special needs, driving them to where they need to go, is married, and has a son.

***

Mar 15, 2025, at 7:47 AM

Good morning. Father Ako will be away next week and he asked if we could find someone who could accompany Mohamed to his ICE appointment at Mohamed’s request. If you or someone from your institution could do so please let [me] know. This could be an interesting experience for someone as well as a mitzvah (good deed) …. Fr. Ako does not know Mohamed. He is not from his church but he receives these kinds of requests from organizations who work with immigrants. Fr. Ako is working on getting Mohamed’s phone number so it is easier to connect.

DETAILS

8am on Tuesday March 18th

ICE office

31 Hopkins Plaza

Suite 630

Baltimore, MD 21201

Thank you, Alisa

***

Mar 15, 2025, at 11:31 AM

I can do it. I will reach out to him.

Elizabeth

Sent from my iPhone

***

Mar 15, 2025, at 11:34 AM

Hi Elizabeth

Thank you very much. I appreciate you.

Fr Ako

***

Mar 18, 2025, at 9:51 AM

We request prayers for Mohamed. He was just detained by ICE. Elizabeth is in touch with a lawyer for help. And we know that prayers can help as well. Thank you.

Here is all that we know so far (from Elizabeth who accompanied Mohamed)—

“I volunteered to accompany Mohamed … to his ICE appointment at the Baltimore ICE office. I was not allowed to sit in the same room with Mohamed while he waited for them to review his papers. But we were able to communicate via text. He informed me he has been detained. That is the last communication I received from him. BUILD is seeking legal guidance for next steps.”

Alisa

***

Mar 18, 2025, at 11:03 AM

Thank you everyone for your prayers.

And thank you to Alisa for leveraging her legal relationships. We now have local attorneys from CASA talking to the attorney from United Stateless, the organization that has been supporting Mohamed and that had requested accompaniment for him today.

Continued prayers for Mohamed and his wife Yvonne and son Saiid and the attorneys working on his case are appreciated.

Elizabeth

Sent from my iPhone

***

Mar 18, 2025, at 11:15 AM

I just got a text from Mohamed that he is being released now!!

Elizabeth

***

Mar 18, 2025, at  4:48pm

Below is the message from the lawyer that got in touch with Mohamed.

“I just spoke to Mohamed who was finally released. He explained that he was briefly detained at the ERO office, then told that he cannot be deported because he is stateless (which, of course, we already know). Then the ICE Officer Johnson sent him to the building next door to enroll in ISAP. He now has an ankle monitor and is under a very strict supervision program with calls every 2 weeks, home visits every 8 weeks, and office check-ins every 16 weeks.

I’m relieved that he is out but it is baffling and frustrating that he is on ISAP now. He has no future court hearings. His final removal order is from 2001. He is a homeowner with a steady job and long-time ties to his community. I plan to immediately reach out and do what I can to de-escalate and ideally unenroll from ISAP.

Mohamed told me that I can share this information with you all. He is also willing to speak publicly if that is an option and would be helpful.”

***

I spoke with Mohamed on the phone this morning. He was very emotional and asked me, “What have I done? Why is this happening?” He said he is close to the edge and seriously considering going back to the Baltimore office of Immigration & Customs Enforcement to ask them to put him back in detention, as he has to wear his ankle monitor 24 hours a day and people are assuming the worst about him; it keeps him up at night so he has not been sleeping, and he is afraid he is going to lose his job. He is going to talk about all this with his lawyer. He is not sure life is worth living this way. I invited him to pray and to breathe with me. And we cried on the phone, together.

Cristina

 

Our next meeting of “Care for the Stranger” is Monday, April 14 at 4pm in our Parish Hall.

 

Dear Folks,

Carl Jung divided life into two phases, calling them our “morning” and “afternoon.” The work of the first phase is the development of the ego, the soul’s morning reserved for relating to the outer world and orienting by it. The second phase is for engaging with the inner world and adapting to it, as the soul develops wholeness, her integrated self. The transition between the two phases occurs at “midlife,” which is discovered at different times by different individuals, and Jung likened the shift to a difficult birth. The masks and personas that have served one well in the past no longer fit, and so in a sometimes painful awakening, the old skin is shed. “There is a self within each one of us aching to be born,” says theologian Alan Jones.

In her book When the Heart Waits, Sue Monk Kidd finds herself in this spiritual labor. Her children were healthy, her marriage was solid, her work was rewarding, and yet she felt hollow and startled by the noise of her unlived voices inside her. She had always been consistent, dependable, hardworking, but increasingly those well-trod patterns didn’t feel like her anymore, or enough of her.

Fear of changing and of how her family, friends, and colleagues would respond was somehow both enticing and daunting, at once. She writes, “What happens when the Pleaser stops pleasing… when Rapunzel stops looking to everyone else to rescue her and begins to climb out of the tower on her own? How do people respond when their favorite martyr ceases to sacrifice her life on the altar of duty? What happens when the Tin Woodman recovers her heart and her real feelings and embraces her body and her sexuality? What happens when Chicken Little decides not to hide from life or truth but takes up her courage and goes out to meet it? When the dawn of a fuller spirituality appears and a new aspect of the true self pushes its way up into the light, (how will we and) the people around us respond? Will they like our new wings?”

In the midst of these questions, Kidd walked over a bridge on the campus of a nearby college, and something on a tree limb caught her eye. At first she goes by the grey protuberance, but is pulled back to consider it: a cocoon. Spirit seemed to be speaking to her about transformation, about the descent of the soul, and of hope. She broke the twig from the limb and carried it home with her, carefully taping the chrysalis to the branch of a crab-apple tree in her backyard.

It occurs to Kidd that the old caterpillar within the cocoon is slowly dissolving and becoming what she will one day be, and that image serves her through her own shadowy waiting. She writes, “The fullness of one’s soul evolves slowly,’ and we go within to gestate the newness forming. We are asked “to collaborate with grace.” This process involves listening to the “disinherited voices within” us, “facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and the undiscovered” parts of ourselves, and opening up the places where one lives falsely. The waiting becomes sacramental, “struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and molding the courage to live that vision.” She discovers in a Thoreau poem the gift of the “long way round”:

Among the worst of men that ever lived,
However we did seriously attend,
A little space we let our thoughts ascend,
Experienced our religion and confessed
Twas good for us to be there-be anywhere:
Then to a heap of apples we addressed
And cleared the topmost rider sine care,
But our Icarian thoughts returned to ground
And we went on to heaven the long way round

“There is nothing instant or automatic” in spiritual development,” writes Alan Jones. So a call to the long way round is the saving way, Kidd realizes, not the quick and easy religion we sometimes hope for, but the deep and difficult slog of the wilderness.

In one particularly dark night, she takes her flashlight and journal, and sitting on the grass she writes: “God, I don’t want to live falsely, in self-imposed prisons and fixed, comfortable patterns that confine my soul and diminish the truth in me. So much of me has gone underground. I want to let my soul out. I want to be free to risk what’s true… Lead me into the enormous spaces of becoming. Help me cease the small, tedious work of maintaining and protecting so that I can break the masks that obscure your face shining in the night of my own soul. Help me to green my soul and risk becoming the person you created me to be.”

So this is our work: to recognize the false selves within us, to hear their voices at last… and then to let them die. The holy one within us is aching to be born.

Love,
David

Death—as overwhelming as the loss of a loved one and as unconscious as our next exhale—is a part of our shared human experience, yet it is something we have a difficult time facing. I avoided it quite nicely until grief around the death of my father snowballed into a mid-life loss of identities and culminated in a head-on crash with my own mortality through a cancer diagnosis. I was mired in melancholy with the question Is this it? swirling in my head.

While this was unfamiliar territory, my response was predictable: don’t think, march! For answers, I looked outside myself—a grief group, books about dying well, a psychiatrist, a Bible Study, and a Zen center. And as much as I resisted—and continue to resist—every one of them pushed me in the same direction—inward.

I picture my soul as an iridescent tear-drop shaped pearl ringed with little rays of light encased in a warm, golden glow. I think this image came from a painting of Jesus, dressed in red with a little “soul patch” over his heart, that hung outside my first-grade classroom. That’s around the time the forces that shape our lives—families, religious traditions, society—take hold and we start trying to fit in, get approval or simply survive. We adopt personas and abandon the curious, insightful, child-like spirit that is our soul force.

My ordered, surface-skimming life had dulled—as if the flames around my soul weren’t getting the oxygen they needed to stay lit. It turns out Is this it? was the first of many questions I needed to ask to understand the internal deadening I felt in the midst of a very vibrant life. It freed me to ask deeper questions: What animates my spirit? When do I feel most alive and what has to die to make room for it? How do I want to be remembered by the people I love the most? A willingness to examine and accept agency in our life is, I believe, the medicine of mortality.

Mortality reignited a sense of curiosity, wonder, and agency around how I show up for myself and others. I am trying—and failing daily—to surrender my illusion of control, to release the myth of arrival, and to lower my fists and open my arms in order to expose my soul, rather than bury it. Each time I’m brave enough to listen to my inner voice, I discover enlivening moments of light-heartedness and joy—as if some of those little soul lights have been turned back on.

Facing our impermanence is uncomfortable because it means we accept death as a part of life. It is also liberating. We get to decide, with intention, how to spend each moment of our limited time on earth—what a gift! It’s an invitation to discover how to be the light we are meant to be in the world.

Please join us to hear the transformative stories of people who have questioned, grappled with, and surrendered to the beauty and pain of mortality.

~Karen McGee

Karen McGee is a vestry member and is co-organizer along with David Ware of this year’s VOICES Lenten series.