The Message November 2020

November 2020 • Volume 22, Number 6

Confronting Our Mortality: 3 Community: 8 A Gift for the Wee Ones: 11 Under the Oaks: 12

The Message this month: Contents:

Contributors:

Christ Church Staff: The Rev. Patrick Gahan, Rector

From Our Rector ..............................3

The Rev. Scott Kitayama, Associate Rector

Music Ministry ................................8 Family Ministry .............................10

The Rev. Brien Koehler, Associate Rector for Mission and Formation

Church Life ....................................12

The Rev. Justin Lindstrom, Associate Rector for Community Formation

Page Turners...................................13

Carol Miller, Pastoral Care Administrator

Great Commission...........................14

Halleta Heinrich, Director of Family Ministry

PATRICK GAHAN

Lily Fenton, Nursery Director

Youth Photo Album..........................15

Amy Case, Youth Minister Susan Lindstrom, Director of College Ministry Joshua Benninger, Music Minister & Organist Jennifer Holloway, Assistant Music Director & Director of Children’s Music

Front Cover photo: Gretchen Duggan Youth Sunday School under the trees

Back Cover photo: Josh Benninger

JENNIFER HOLLOWAY

Women’s Bible Study under the trees

Donna Franco, Financial Manager Gretchen Comuzzi Duggan, Director of Communications

Live Stream Services:

Monica Elliott, Executive Assistant to the Rector

www.cecsa.org/live-stream or www.facebook.com/ChristChurchSATX/live

Elizabeth Martinez, Kitchen Manager HALLETA HEINRICH

Robert Vallejo, Facilities Manager Rudy Segovia, Hospitality Manager

In Person Services:

Joe Garcia, Sexton

Sunday 9:00 & 11:00 a.m. on the lawn Holy Eucharist, Rite II Sunday School 10:10 a.m. outside on the grounds Christian Education, Small groups and Bible studies for Children, Youth, and Adults are offered in person on Sunday and via Zoom Visit us on-line at www.cecsa.org 2

Robert Hanley, Director of Campus Operations Darla Nelson, Office Manager

Editor: Gretchen Duggan

9:00 & 11:00 a.m. Sundays 9:15 a.m. Wednesdays

Charissa Fenton, Receptionist

2020 Vestry: MARY CARTER

Darrell Jones, Senior Warden Barbara Black, Junior Warden Andy Anderson

Sudie Holshouser

Lisa Blonkvist

Andy Kerr

Catherine de Marigny David McArthur Meagan Desbrow

Margaret Pape

Tobin Hays

Robert Rogers

Why Must We Confront Our Deaths?

Ceiling of Cubiculum in the Catacomb of Ss. Pietro and Marcellinus, Rome, late 3rd - early 4th century

by Patrick Gahan

My aunt Florence asked for a flock

of chickens before she died. It was a perplexing request in that she had lived in the sprawling Birmingham suburbs for over sixty years. Nevertheless, my cousins Lee and Dana Marie moved her to the family farm where they wheeled their mother to the gate of the chicken coop each morning of her last days.

Thomas Jefferson, just three months before he died, “put down his hatchet” and picked up his pen to write John Adams, his nemesis of four decades.

Almost as if he had awakened from a dream, a remnant of the third president’s elegiac prose returned. He reminisced, “It was the lot of our early years to witness the dull monotony of colonial subservience and our riper ones to breast the labors and perils of working out of it.” Jefferson and Adams both died within hours of one another on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Sigmund Freud, suffering from cancer of the jaw and having endured thirty grueling surgeries, knew his death was close at hand. In his final days, he asked to be situated by an open window, where he could enjoy the varied hues and scents of his English garden, a strange request for a man who had lived the previous forty years in an upstairs Vienna apartment overlooking a noisy urban boulevard. Freud had reluctantly moved to London on May 5, 1939 after the Nazis publicly burned his books and viciously interrogated his daughter Anna. He died only four months later.

Captain Henry Waskow was commander of Company B of the 143rd Battalion, a company which, by December 14, 1943, had been hewn down to the size of a single rifle platoon. With the dead men of his company strewn all about a mountain face in the Italian Apennines during the Battle for San Pietro, the captain confided in his runner, Private Riley Tidwell, that he had a sudden craving for toast. The 25-year-old Texan, a child of German immigrants who farmed cotton south of Temple, mused, “When we get back to the

States, I’m going to get me one of those smart-aleck toasters where you put the bread in, and it pops up.” Those would be among the last words ever uttered by the brave, understated Bell County captain.

These four individuals, two famous and two largely unknown, all sought simple vestiges of life as they neared death.

Chickens, the sight and scent of the outdoors, a repaired friendship, the taste of toast and butter. No elaborate “bucket lists” for these four, just modest traces of treasures unearthed from deeply buried, yet not forgotten, experiences. A holiday in Maui pales in the face of breakfast served on your mother’s kitchen table, especially when 100,000 bombs have burst all around your precarious foothold on a shallow mountain crag and upon your even more tenuous hold on life.

Every one of us has a rather tenuous hold on life. This fact has been obtrusively exposed in a most unwelcome manner by the scourge of the Coronavirus. While bodies are not piled up along the road as with the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic that killed 50 million – 10 million more than 3

From Our Rector...

WWI’s total casualties – this 21st century virus is lethal. As my veteran nurse wife has stated repeatedly, “We can be cavalier about the small ratio of deaths until you are flat on your back in ICU.”

We’ve wasted no time deceiving ourselves.

We have used the Covid-19 crisis to spin new excuses from fully experiencing life.

Some, following a collective orthodoxy, have insisted that all life’s pursuits must

I am hard pressed to name a benefit I choose, instead, the witness of those Roman to this viral assault except that I know Christians of the 2nd through the 4th centuries, who it has made us in the face of widespread persecution by the empire, keenly “aware of the descended to the catacombs to continue their praises shortness of human life,” as the words of to God and nourish their community. one of our Episcopal prayers advises. The be put on hold. The fact that we cannot promise of eternal life does not abrogate our desire to live this life on earth, the only do the accustomed things has left us frozen in place. Exercising a measure of life we know this side of Paradise. That’s fierce puritanical discipline, we swear off the rub, isn’t it? Confined to our homes pursuing new avenues of creativity – as for three months and, even now, relegated if to do so would be sacrilegious. On to a small, repetitive circuit, many have that score, some of our most respected stared into the emptiness of their lives.

Church leaders across the country have The distractions we have manufactured urged Christians to use this time to sit and after years of practice have been pulled out from under us like a carpet in slapstick lament, like Job perched upon his trove of ashes or Israel being confined to Babylon. comedy, but we’re not laughing. True, While I respect their guidance to use this some can retreat to second homes, time for increased contemplation, I reject ranches, mountain retreats, beach houses, the notion that we turn off the faucet of and boats. Death stalks those places as Living Water. I choose, instead, the witness surely as it hunts the thoroughfares, culof those Roman Christians of the 2nd de-sacs, and condos bordering both sides through the 4th centuries, who in the face of Highway 281. Whether languishing of widespread persecution by the empire, in the humid soup of urban San Antonio descended to the catacombs to continue or luxuriating in the thin, brisk air of Colorado’s high country, we must confront their praises to God and nourish their community. They construed their artwork our deaths. Why? If we fail to do so, we across those labyrinthine walls to remind will succumb to what masquerades as life but is actually no more than a living death. themselves and generations to come that they were much alive. If we imagine this is The seductions of this living death, the fanciful ancient history, take a harder look power of “non-life,” I call it, should not at Christians in 21st century China who be underestimated. A Christian author I refuse to surrender to the powers of nonadmire recounted an ancient encounter life no matter how viciously Xi Jinping and between a teacher and a disciple: “The disciple asked his master, ‘Is there life after his godless party hound them. death.’ The master answered, ‘The great On the other side of the divide, we have spiritual question is not if there is life a growing number of Covid-deniers. after death. The great spiritual question They insist the mortality numbers are is whether there is life before death.’”1 over-calculated, the lethality over-stated, The disciple wanted to discuss an abstract and the scare over-emphasized to achieve future life. The master pressed his charge political gain and exercise government to confront the hard facts of his present over-reach. The deniers’ drumbeat is to life, lest he settle for mere existence. “un-mask” this fraud and get back to 1 Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict: Insight for business as usual. Their voiced frustration the Ages (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 25.

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is understandable, especially when the fallout is Depression era unemployment, isolated elders declining within the barricades of retirement facilities, angry crowds burning cities, and a mental health crisis that will, for years, hang around our shoulders like Coleridge’s albatross. If any of their number pursued a quick review of Coronavirus hotspots, they would face its lethality. Some indigenous tribes in Brazil have an almost 100% infection rate. Closer to home, we need only to take a look at our Native American reservations to perceive the unchecked march of the virus.

It is as if Cortés has brought Smallpox to the Aztecs all over again. As the rancor encircles us, the increasing clamor of the deniers makes me wonder if they are not so much denouncing Covid-19 as they are repudiating the fact of death itself.

To deny death does not open the way to freedom and creativity. Instead such delusion opens us to the devious powers of non-life.

It is rather dark serendipity that the Coronavirus acts as a modern-day parable.

Viruses, while ubiquitous beyond measure on earth, are not really living organisms.

They glom onto life and deform the life they inhabit. A small pail of ocean water may contain up to 100 billion virus particles, while two pounds of dirt from your front yard likely harbors over 1 trillion. To draw a stark example, there are 100 billion stars studding our galaxy, the Milky Way, and at least two trillion additional galaxies in the observable universe. Virus particles on earth alone far outnumber all the stars in the cosmos.

Furthermore, viruses are the fiercest predators on earth – both on the seas and on land. From slaying great swaths of plankton in the ocean to overtaking cells in the human gut, viruses never rest in their killing sprees. No matter how plentiful and powerful, viruses are not really living but live off the cells of other living things.

They occupy their hosts to multiply their viral genome.2 The fact that we human beings thrive in this plethora of assailants The Economist, August 22, 2020, “The Aliens Amongst Us,” 9, 17-22. With apologies to the scientists and medical professionals in our congregation for my simplistic explanations.

2

From Our Rector... is in thanksgiving to our evolutionary adaptability bestowed by God. Thank you, Charlie Darwin, for alerting us to that fact.

The fact that we fend off the newest and vilest of emerging viruses is a testimony to human ingenuity. For that, you can thank a scientist this fall when you get your flu shot.

While the intricacies of viruses are extremely complicated, the parable we derive from them is unquestionably simple.

The powers of non-life encircle us. So pervasive are they that it is far easier just to give in to them and let nature take its course. To concede to the enticements of non-life, however, puts us on a treadmill from which an exit is exacting beyond measure. For example, the accumulation of one thing does not sate us but leads us to amass more. Immense storage facilities at the corners of every American neighborhood are cavernous testimonies to that. The demand for amped-up experiences has us crave ever-increasing sensation. The proof is the pervasive porn industry blanketing the internet as well as the partisan newsfeeds, such as the recondite “Q ,” whose seductive pull on his “believers” approaches pornographic enticement. Non-life cannot fulfill us, yet it cries out, “More, more, more!”

An example from my college days comes to mind. During my freshman year at Trinity, I undertook a four-hour course in Behavioral Psychology. The lectures, based on the pioneering work of B.F. Skinner, the father of “Positive and Negative Reinforcement,” were fascinating. The labs, on the other hand, were toilsome, for in them we had to program rats. For months we lured our given rat to push a bar on the “Skinner Box” so that he would receive a pellet of food. Slowly, we increased the ante, so that the rat had to push the bar two times for a single pellet, then five, ten, and so on. By the end of the term, our rat had to push the bar so many times for a single pellet that he was rapidly losing body mass. No matter, he kept on pushing as if possessed. Humanly speaking, the experiment was terrifying.

We will go to most any extreme to garner a morsel of sensation. This is why St.

Paul repeatedly warns of giving in to the “flesh,” for he knew from experience how it would “box” us in: ‘For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do’ (Galatians 5:17).

Paul’s emphasis here is not being good boys and girls versus bad. No, his fear is that we will let nature take its course and end up with little or no life at all. I have often quoted this line from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters where the senior devil giddily regales his apprentice devilin-training with a report on a man he ultimately enticed to hell. Upon his arrival, the hapless man confesses, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.” Following this harrowing admission, Lewis’s senior devil waxes on about the hollow seduction of non-life: The Christians describe the Enemy (God) as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong’.3 And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim, labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake them off.4 “Nothing is, indeed, strong,” so strong we can fill our days with nothingness. Nonlife does not make us abhorrent, merely vacant. How do we disentangle ourselves from this nightmare and live? Dickens’s Scrooge offers us the answer when he “wakes up” from his bad dream. The Note: C.S. Lewis drew this line from the Book of Common Prayer’s Collect for Proper 12, the Sunday closest to July 27.

4 C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Harper, 1942), 60.

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ghosts who visit him on Christmas Eve night do not accuse him of heinous crimes but of self-consumed inattention. Scrooge does not enjoy the fruits of his own labor, much less share them with anyone else.

His is the “dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why.” By the sheer grace of his overnight visitations, Scrooge awakens to the life he has left behind.

This is Paul’s ambition, to awaken us from wiling away in nothingness. Towards the end of his powerful missive, Romans, the great apostle leaves off his doctrinal arguments and offers a succession of practical instructions. Paul, having sworn off the tedium of the treadmill for the inspirited life, urges his readers to do the same: ‘The night is far gone; the day is at hand.

So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light’ (Romans 13:12).

...Paul wants his readers to live fully in this new day and every subsequent day that they have been given.

Forging a picture of fingers of light on the horizon, Paul wants his readers to live fully in this new day and every subsequent day that they have been given.

It is no accident that Paul uses the edge of morning to portray his point, for that is the time Jesus rose from the dead. Paul enjoins the Romans and us that as Jesus awoke from death, we, too, must awaken from a deadly life. The resurrection does not only portend life after death but life before death. Now is the time of our great awakening.

Those who are in Christ experience their awakening through the Holy Spirit, no matter how virulent the darkness that pursues them. The last book of the Bible offers this truth as a crescendo to the previous sixty-five. In the entire Bible, only Job, of ancient poetic fame, was cast in more darkness than John of the Revelation. Job’s darkness was of a personal nature. The darkness pursuing John covered all seven church 5

From our Rector... communities he served in Asia Minor.

Based on references within the cryptic writing, Emperor Nero’s (37-68 AD) evil administration exiles John to an Aegean island 40 miles off the coast of Turkey, while the seven churches he pastors on the mainland are systematically persecuted.

Beneath the shadow of crazed Nero, the future for these Christians seems bleaker than could be conjured by a pandemic, because they are shrouded in a darkness fueled, not by a pathogen, but by viral hate.

not ceased and will not cease until that great day. In addition, if looked at that way, all Scripture of the Old and New Testaments are Apocalypses, because the entire Bible, in some measure, reveals Christ’s imprint on the world. The Revelation of John is the fitting conclusion to the Bible because it centers our vision on Christ, the Lamb of God, who is on the throne of the cosmos – regardless of the noise Nero or any other temporal tyrant may make. ‘I am the First and Last. I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look…’, the resurrected Christ assures inspirited John.

unceasing revelation to them. Recall the poignant scene when Jesus takes his last walk with the disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus has just warned them that the hour is fast approaching when authorities will adulate anyone who harms or kills them as if their violence was an act of worship (16:2). Solemnly digesting the bad news, Jesus breaks the silence:

Hopelessly isolated from the congregations he loved and served, John exercises the one freedom he still retains. He ...Christ, the Lamb of God, holds the offers his Sunday prayers as if he universe in his hands and he alone controls were surrounded by his congregants.

As he prays, all heaven breaks loose: history and man’s destiny...

I, John, your brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus, was on the island of Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. On the Lord’s Day I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, which said: “Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches… I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades. Revelation 1:9-12, 17-18 Often called the Apocalypse of John, Revelation is a letter of hope to those caught in a great pain and fear beyond their control. Apocalypse, which is Apokalypsis in the Greek, means to unveil details about what God is up to, ergo a divine revelation. More specifically, an apocalypse reveals the incarnation of God through Christ, for the revelation of Christ, who came to humanity in all humility, is the core of what God “is up to.” Looked at that way, the Incarnation will never be over until the consummation of the age when heaven and earth are united. Jesus’ resurrection appearances, such as John ecstatically experienced, have 6

I add those details so that we can understand the essential work of the Spirit in our awakening to life in the present.

John and his fellow Christians fear that because of Nero it is “game over” for believers. Praying “in the Spirit,” the resurrected Christ is “revealed” to John and Christ issues his revelation of hope and guidance for the seven churches.

Ultimately, the revelation is that Christ, the Lamb of God, holds the universe in his hands and he alone controls history and man’s destiny, which brings us to another term with which we need to become familiar if we are to understand Revelation – eschatology. Derived from the Greek eskhatos, the word means the study of the “last, furthest, most extreme, final, or ultimate things.” John’s Revelation assures the readers of those seven besieged churches and ours in the pandemic plagued modern churches that God’s “ultimate” will for the world will be realized. Thus, Revelation is not so much about prediction as it is about awareness – the awareness that God’s future is always breaking in on us.

This awareness comes to us in the same way it was extended to John – by the Holy Spirit. We should not be surprised by this, for Jesus himself told the disciples the Spirit would be the conduit for his

‘I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.’ John 16:12-15

Jesus is telling us that life is never meaningless, no matter our age or situation. Christ never quits speaking to us, guiding us, and disclosing reality to us. Because of this, not even seasons of chronic pain, shattering loss, debilitating fear, and suffocating pandemics can render our lives useless, because Christ is present to us through the Spirit. Looked at that way, all of life, and not just the primary and teen years, are times of immense growth for every believer. We need only become aware of the Spirit’s presence like our brother John on the Island of Patmos.

To come to this awareness is urgent, and to confront the brevity of our earthly lives is equally urgent. We really don’t have all the time in the world. This fact routinely slaps me in the face as Kay and I are offering Morning Prayer before she leaves for work. Most days we sing Psalm 95, the Venite, together, which is quite a feat at 4:45 AM! The last line of the canticle hits with a thud, ‘Oh, that today you would hearken to His voice’ (Psalm 95:7). I was not surprised to learn that St. Benedict insisted his Latin monks offer these same words each morning as the Vandals, Goths, Visigoths, Lombards, Franks, and Burgundians repeatedly attacked and ransacked Rome.

Their world was breaking apart, their deaths ever closer, and yet their ears were

From our Rector... attuned, not to the enemy, but to God.

of his death. Within moments an artillery shell ripped through Waskow’s chest, and he fell without a sound alongside the bodies of his men. Waskow would certainly be forgotten, like the other 320,000 allied dead in the Italian Campaign, if the great WW II journalist

Tidwell took up his commander’s hand and Contemplating Benedict’s determined studied Waskow’s waxy face. Finally, he monks, I return to Captain Waskow on put the hand down. He reached over and that “scabrous knoll” in the Battle for San gently straightened the points of the captain’s Pietro to conclude this essay. Waskow, shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged knowing the odds, carefully wrote a “justthe tattered edges of the uniform around in-case” letter to his family the the wound, and then he got up and year before. One of eight children, walked away down the road in the Because of this, not even seasons of chronic pain, Waskow was a lay preacher in moonlight, all alone. The rest of us shattering loss, debilitating fear, and suffocating the German Baptist Church, and went back into the cowshed, leaving he graduated from Belton High the five men lying in a line, end-to-end pandemics can render our lives useless, because School with the highest average in the shadow of a low stone wall.5 Christ is present to us through the Spirit. of anyone in twenty years. His classmates called him “a sweet Citing home front morale, the little oddball.” Waskow himself admitted Ernie Pyle had not spied the captain’s Department of Defense delayed the that he was never young. By necessity, body being brought down the side of a delivery of Waskow’s letter to his family he skipped the antics of adolescence. In mountain. Pyle caught sight of four mules until after the holidays. His sister and fact, while attending Trinity College in laboring to convey the bodies of young parents received his letter in mid-January Waxahachie, TX, just before its move to American men down the heights. Once of ’43: San Antonio, Waskow joined the Texas down the mountain, corpsmen laid out National Guard solely because he could five of the bodies, foot to head, beneath When you remember me, remember me as a earn one dollar for each drill session. a crude limestone wall. Without word or fond admirer of all of you, for I thought so His financial necessity landed him in the fanfare, Pyle saw the few surviving soldiers much of you and loved you with all my heart.

U.S. Army and eventually placed him of Waskow’s company file beside his body, My wish for all of you is that you get along on the shores of Italy, where the terror as if they were in a dark-paneled funeral well together and prosper—not in money— and loss of life were equal to that at Iwo home in Midwest America. Each soldier but in happiness, for happiness is something Jima, Tarawa, and Guadalcanal. During said a word to Waskow – something Pyle, that all the money in the world can’t buy. the terrible Battle of Salerno, the short in the innumerable battles he covered, Try to live a life of service—to help someone preacher oddball distinguished himself had never witnessed. Then Private Riley where you are or whatever you may be--take fighting alongside Darby’s Rangers and Tidwell appeared, and Pyle took out his it from me; you can get happiness out of that, was rapidly promoted through the ranks. notebook. This would be Pyle’s greatest more than anything in life. essay of the war, so that the story of 5 Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War “Wouldn’t this be an awful spot to get Waskow’s death was spread across the Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (New York: Holt, killed and freeze on the mountain?” front page of many city editions across the in 2007), 288-290; 293, 342.

Waskow asked Tidwell in a premonition country.

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Community Music Ministry

by Jennifer Holloway

As many of you know, my father was

the Director of Music at Laurel Heights United Methodist Church just up Belknap from Christ Episcopal. He retired in 1998 after serving there for 40 years. In those 40 years, he led a vibrant and engaged music ministry with three children’s choirs, two youth choirs, an adult choir, and two handbell choirs. He took the children’s choirs to camp every summer at the H‑E‑B foundation in Leakey, Texas, where we sang, played, hiked, and swam together.

We began each morning and ended each day with worship on the banks of the Frio River. (To this day, I am transported back to those river side worship services every time I sing “This Is My Father’s World.”) He directed the youth choir in a musical review every June and then took us all around the country on trips in July. He started a senior adult program that is still going strong today, under the guidance of my mother who took it over after my father retired. In fact, Pamela Pattie, my fellow alto in the choir, is an active member of the aptly named Super Adult program. My father was also very 8

involved in the amazing drama program at Laurel Heights, directing many plays and musicals, as well as performing in them throughout the years, many of which I participated in. These are just a few of the many things my father did in his 40 years at Laurel Heights.

I tell you all of this not to brag on my father, although I do think that he is a pretty amazing individual, but so that you can understand the environment that shaped me. Community. The community of faith that I was raised in at Laurel Heights has left an indelible impression on me. To this day my oldest and closest friends are people that I grew up with at Laurel Heights. I would not have the relationships I have with these friends were it not for our shared experiences growing up in the church.

Growing up Methodist, especially the daughter of a Methodist Director of Music, I learned the power that music holds. I was well-schooled in the stories of John and Charles Wesley and the great hymn singing tradition that encompasses the Methodist Church. You could say that the Methodist theme song is Charles Wesley’s “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing My Great Redeemer’s Praise.”

Services were more than hoping for

the biggest chunk of bread and fullest shot glass of grape juice at communion, although there was always that! Worship was singing the beautiful hymns with my family, and when I got older with my friends sitting up in the balcony or in the choir loft. We may have spent much of the service passing notes and trying not to giggle too loudly, but when it came to the hymns, we all joined in enthusiastically.

I learned to communicate with God through music.

It was no great surprise to anyone when I decided to study Vocal Performance at Southern Methodist University. Nor was it much of a surprise when, upon graduation, I announced that I would be moving to Chicago to pursue a career as a singer and actor. I lived there for four years, singing and acting some, but mostly working several jobs at once to make ends meet. A few of the jobs I held included being a barista at Starbucks, working in a property management company, being a cater waiter, waiting tables at what I learned after starting work there, was a mafia owned restaurant and cigar bar in downtown Chicago, and, much to the chagrin of my Methodist parents, was a bartender for a time. While I have some great stories from these jobs, and had some amazing performing experiences in

Music Ministry...

Chicago, I found that the pull of family and community was too strong for me to ignore any longer. I missed the days of being able to jump in the car and be at my parents’ doorstep in a matter of hours.

After a few years of the starving artist lifestyle, I decided to move back to Dallas where I was able to make a living as a performer and managed to leave my service industry jobs behind. I acted in plays and musicals in theaters in Dallas and Ft Worth, sang occasionally with jazz bands, recorded voice overs for several studios, taught theater classes at the Dallas Children’s Theater, and taught private voice lessons in my home studio. I even did a little on camera work, mostly in industrial training films. Although I did get recognized once at the King William Fair by a group of teenagers who apparently stayed up late enough to see the low budget commercial for a pager and cell phone company I was featured in! I stayed in Dallas for about seven years before returning to San Antonio, a move that was supposed to be temporary, for me to get my Masters in Music Performance. That was in 2007.

When I left San Antonio, I left behind my ties to the church as a needed presence in my life. Church became a job, a means to an end, another gig. While at SMU, I would occasionally attend Highland Park Methodist Church. My cousins were active members of that congregation, and if I attended church with them, I would be treated to a very nice lunch out after the service. As a college student, nice lunches are few and far between. Attending church was a means to an end. In Chicago, one of my many jobs was as the alto soloist and section leader and children’s choir director at the Chicago Temple, the First United Methodist Church in downtown Chicago across from Daley Plaza. This job was nothing more than another gig to me. Going to sing in the services felt no different at the time than any other singing engagement. I made no effort to make connections with the church and congregation other than what was necessary to do my job.

Now, I do have to pause here and give a side note on the Chicago Temple. If you are ever in Chicago, I highly encourage you to stop and tour the building. It is a 568-foot-tall skyscraper with the first three floors housing the sanctuary and church offices. The following floors are rented out as office space. At the very top of the building, under the spire, is a beautiful chapel, appropriately named the Sky Chapel. The three floors under the chapel are reserved for the Senior Pastor’s residence, known as the Penthouse Parsonage: pretty fancy digs for a Methodist Minister.

I never stopped believing or having faith, I just forgot what it meant to truly be a

Christian, to live my life as a Christian. I failed to remember the importance of a personal relationship with

God. I failed

to remember the importance of the community of faith.

In Dallas, I was more of a freelance church musician. I filled in wherever I was needed, singing with the Methodists one Sunday and the Unitarians the next. I think my most memorable Sunday service with the Unitarians was singing “Working 9 to 5” as the anthem because they were discussing spirituality in the workplace. On the Sundays I wasn’t working, I blissfully slept in, then lingered over my morning coffee, not aware of the growing hole in my life. Upon moving back to San Antonio, I was hired by Owen Duggan as one of the paid members of the choir here at Christ Episcopal. I sang here for a few years, until I was offered the position of Adult Choir Director at St Peter’s Prince of the Apostles Catholic Church in Alamo Heights. I served as the choir director there for four years until I decided to go back to being a paid soloist rather than director in 2015. I contacted Josh and luckily there was space for me here in the choir. I have been here ever since. That move was one of the best decisions of my

life. I had no idea what abundant gifts that simple change in jobs would bring into my life.

I have been restless for a good deal of my adult life. It is probably evident that I have moved from job to job quite frequently.

A few years ago, I tried to think of how many apartments and houses I lived in between the ages of 18 and 35. It was a long list. I think I was unconsciously trying to fill the void left from my lack of life in the spirit. I attended church for the paycheck, but never let it touch my life in any other way. I never stopped believing or having faith, I just forgot what it meant to truly be a Christian, to live my life as a Christian. I failed to remember the importance of a personal relationship with God. I failed to remember the importance of the community of faith.

I am still a work in progress, as I will always be, but the change I have seen in my life, the change I have seen in my relationships with my family, with my friends...I know this change is from finally trying to truly abide in the spirit and knowing that the spirit abides in me. My song has changed too. Singing in church has once again become a joyous exaltation to God, rather than just another gig. This congregation has opened its arms to not only me, but to my entire family and we have gladly fallen into its embrace. From worshiping alongside my husband Steve, watching Henry perform his acolyting duties with total devotion, to singing with my beautiful daughter Isabella in the choir, Christ Episcopal has touched my family’s life in countless ways. It has challenged me to renew and deepen my relationship with Christ. In the past five years at Christ Episcopal, I have found what I did not even realize I was missing - Community.

I will

Singv LORD

to the all my life Psalm 104:33

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Vignettes from the Pandemic CEC Family Ministry

by Halleta Heinrich

God is calling me to share some thoughts and experiences, and wisdom I have gained here at Christ Church through the pandemic. Here they are: Boys are Funny and Unpredictable God Love’em!

Recently in our outdoor Creation Celebration Sunday School class, I had an all-boy attendance. We finished the Seven Days of Creation from Genesis, and I thought it would be a good idea to have each child pick a favorite day to illustrate and then connect all to make a Creation Timeline.

Well, it was a good idea, but the results were surprising and hilarious. After all, it was a class of boys. The funniest illustration was the seventh day, the Sabbath, when God had completed creation and declared it a day of rest. My ten-year-old student made a drawing of a big guy with yellow streaks coming off his body and a small bottle placed in the bottom corner. The words coming out of the big guy’s mouth were “I’m done!”

I asked about the bottle in the corner.

“That’s deodorant.” He replied. Oh, now I knew what the yellow streaks were

- God’s sweat. He had worked hard and needed a break and some deodorant, too.

All the other boys’ drawings included a spaceship of some kind no matter what their particular day of creation, but it made sense to them, and me too, I guess.

What fun! Of course, if there had been girls there that day, the drawings would have more than likely been a lot different and predictable – filled with butterflies and flowers, kitties and puppy dogs, etc. The guys’ timeline will be on display soon for everyone’s benefit!

Be Not Afraid One of my sisters sent me a photo of a painting by artist Greg Olsen entitled “Be Not Afraid.” I loved it because it is one of my major goals in life to instill this message in our children to not be afraid.

They are never alone – God’s love will never leave them no matter what. The painting shows Jesus holding a child close to him as he helps another child with outstretched hand cross a rushing stream.

I had just received a gift of a check from a dear man, who was a member of the church, to use for Children’s Ministry.

He included a note and some stickers he thought the kids would like. I appreciated his note so much in that he stated he liked reading my articles in The Message. I wrote him a note of thanks and found out some things about him from the clergy. He was in his nineties, was a retired Music Minister, and had never been married or had children. A short time after I sent the note, the church received the message that he had died from the Corona Virus. I was so glad I had written him my note of appreciation. I don’t know if he was able to read it, but I know his Spirit was aware of it. I look forward to getting to know him in Heaven!

I decided to use his gift to purchase a copy of the painting “Be Not Afraid” and the framing of it. It will be placed in the Family Ministry Center in loving memory of this dear man I never met and as a

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reminder to all to Be Not Afraid!

Our Great Cloud of Witnesses The impact of the pandemic and all its related occurrences has been intensified by my Dad’s death this past summer. His death hit me harder than I thought it would, but it has brought much healing and forgiveness. While going through his house and all his things – papers and photos, I felt a closeness to him and all those who had gone before us. The Communion of Saints became very tangible in this process. I could feel their love around us.

I saw letters he had written to his parents and sister during World War II, and letters they had written to him, all contained neatly in a box. I realized the great love they had for each other. My dad was only seventeen when he entered the Marines right after Pearl Harbor. I discovered photos and letters of family I had never known, but I knew they were with us.

Just a few weeks before my Dad’s death, he shared with me a wonderful dream. He said he was welcomed to a place where there were all these beautiful and glowing people he did not know. They were so happy to see him. I told him “Dad, that’s the Communion of Saints, that great Cloud of Witnesses who have gone on before us.” I believe he accepted that as true. This was more than a dream. It was a vision.

One of the main reasons I became an Episcopalian is the respect shown for the Communion of Saints, and the emphasis on the reality of the eternal. This truth works its way through all of our liturgy. It is also very scriptural. My Dad died with the knowledge that all wrong will be made right in our eternal home. He got it! Now he is part of my great Cloud of Witnesses.

I wish all of you the joy that children bring, the courage that Jesus gives, and the sure hope of Heaven provided by our beautiful faith. We are a blessed people!

Something Beautiful For Our Youngest Members

Something very beautiful is coming soon

to delight and form our youngest members – a Toddler Atrium which is a very simple introduction to our Catechesis of the Good Shepherd Christian Formation we offer to our preschoolers and younger elementary children. The pandemic has provided us with the time to create a special environment for our eighteen-month through younger three-year-old children.

Elements of this special place are handson learning centers composed of Jesus Our Good Shepherd teaching that we are loved unconditionally, the Bible and stories of the childhood of Jesus, introductions to the Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion, Seasons of the Church Year, and Biblical Geography. In addition, children will visit the Prayer Table and offer prayers each session and learn from simple and developmentally appropriate books that relate to the learning centers.

Puzzles that reinforce the centers’ teachings, and other puzzles and language learning activities that are fun and creative are also part of this toddler friendly space.

I give thanks to our very talented and creative Nursery Staff, Linda Balderama, Mary Esther Cano, and Gloria Ortiz who have helped in creating this beautiful ministry space!

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Under the Oaks

by Mary Carter

It is so wonderful that our church and the Episcopal Diocese have done so much to keep us safe during the pandemic. Like many, I am really grateful for the Sunday services I can watch on my computer at home, often in my pajamas, and while working at my desk. Since I work almost every Sunday afternoon away from home, this has been heaven and for a while I hung onto “pajama church.”

Three weeks ago, I had a friend whose daughter was having her Banns of Marriage announced, and she asked me to go to the service since she couldn’t make it.

That Sunday changed my whole direction.

When I was little my grandmother lived in Burnet, Texas. We were best friends.

She was the kind of grandmother that is described in storybooks. She lived in a very small apartment down the street from her oldest son, both of them devout Southern Baptists. She made every kind of cookie, loved to fry chicken, taught me to sew, to play cards, and she made my dolls all their clothes. My parents were devout Roman Catholics and would let me go see her anytime I wished, with the stipulation that I had to go to the Catholic Church every Sunday. Our next-door neighbor had an

elderly sister in Burnet so he would take me to visit anytime I wanted to go.

To abide by our agreement, every Sunday we would walk several miles and cross a huge highway, then trek up a hill to get to the Catholic Church. My grandmother would never put a foot in that Church but would always find a nice-looking older couple to take me with them and she would sit outside on a bench in heat or cold and wait. The masses were in Latin then and sermons very short, but we had communion which I loved. Then we would walk fast to downtown to her church.

In the summers at the Baptist Church, everyone met out in tents in the yard under great big oak trees. There was a bit of singing, kind of “old time” religious songs and the preaching was much like I heard at night on my grandmother’s radio from Billy Graham. I loved the service and it was in English. As we sat under the trees, some of the yellow leaves would fly around us. When the service was over there was always someone in the group that would offer for us to join them for lunch and it was always wonderful food, and other little children would be sitting on quilts in the yard around the grown-ups listening to their life stories.

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Every Sunday evening, we went across the street from her apartment to the Methodist Church. This was all singing: the most beautiful music. They had a gorgeous choir and often when I look closely at our Hymnal, I remember every song that I learned back then. My grandmother had strict thoughts about dancing being sinful but swaying to music was not against her religion for sure.

Bottom line, the first time I went to our Church this fall, “Christ Church Under the Oaks” I was brought back to those happy memories and the joy they sewed in my heart as a child. We have it all in one package every Sunday in two offerings. We have amazing music and a great mixture of ancient hymns alongside traditional and new ones. We have the sacraments just like my upbringing. We have beautiful oak trees to sit under and enjoy. But more than anything, we have incredible preaching from our ministers and life stories from our members along with darling children sitting on quilts. Plus, we have fellowship and maybe someday we can have fried chicken and apple pie, and it will really be Burnet to me.

Certainly, many people have to be careful.

But if you are healthy and want to have this gift, socially distanced, give it a try!

PAGE TURNERS – From the Rector’s Book Stack I reached for my iPhone in desperation and quickly touched the maroon, blue, and white Libby app displayed on the second screen. The days had become long, and longer still with problems that I could not fix. I felt as if I was running the 100-meter dash atop a glacier. Books are the best transport away from tedium and frustration, and the Brits corner is the recipe for the best books to do that.

In Libby’s “Search” command, I typed “BBC,” and a string of audio books appeared. The one in the list that caught my eye was An Uncommon Reader,

by Alan Bennett. Reading itself has become “uncommon” enough. I couldn’t wait to discover who the “uncommon reader” may be. I fired up the Bluetooth speaker, climbed on the torturous elliptical machine, and in less than a minute the identity of the “uncommon reader” was disclosed – the Queen of England.

of St. Paul 164 times in his 13 epistles, which provides the focus of Richard Rohr’s latest book, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe. With that mouthful of a title, Rohr pens what will likely be his last hurrah due to his fight with aggressive prostate cancer along with severe heart attack a year and a half ago. Monica Elliott, my able Executive Assistant, gifted me with the book last Christmas and eight months later, I pulled it from the shelf. The 77-year-old Franciscan priest has penned 51 books to date at an almost breathless rate.

This book, however, is like reading the great man’s last will and testament, and his unguarded words challenged me in every chapter. In Chapter 4: Original Goodness he gives the best and most succinct posture for authentic evangelism:

Sweating atop the torturous contraption, I started chuckling as soon as Alan Bennett started reading his novella. My chuckling turned to laughing when the Queen follows her two Welsh Corgis out a side door of the palace and encounters the district’s library van. She steps into the van to apologize for her yapping canines and unexpectedly ends up with a book to read and a red-haired reading partner, Norman, who washes dishes in the palace kitchen. Within days, the queen becomes captivated by books and regularly enchanted by her daily consultations with dishwashing Norman. Her new regimen foments a crisis in the palace and upsets many a state function, for the queen wants nothing more than to get back to her books. The crisis intensifies when Her Majesty entertains new ways of thinking and finally decides on a baffling course of action. Whoever imagined books could provoke such a royal melee and get a preacher laughing in a pandemic!

We are called to be “mirrors of Christ’ — that is take on the mind of Christ. Instead, however, we have shrunk Jesus down to a very limited role of solving our sin problem.

We concentrate on his death rather than his life. Does he not give himself for “the life of the world”? If Jesus becomes just the answer for our sin, then our religion becomes nothing more than “sin management.” Who would be attracted to that?

‘En Christo’ or ‘In Christ’ comes off the pen

In Chapter 5: Love is the Meaning, he reinterprets our sin as Christ’s coveted avenue to heal us, awaken us, transform us, and move us toward a meaningful, whole future: The Crucified and Risen Christ uses the mistakes of the past to create a positive future, a future of redemption instead of retribution.

He does not eliminate or punish the mistakes.

He uses them for transformative purposes.

People formed by such love are indestructible.

Forgiveness might just be the very best description of what God’s goodness engenders in humanity.

My favorite was Chapter 12: Why Did Jesus Die? Here Rohr dares to take on the notion of Christ’s “substitutionary atonement” with the Hebrew prophet’s insistence of “restorative justice.”

As long as we employ any retributive notion of God’s offended justice (required punishment for wrongdoing), we trade our distinctive Christian message for the cold, hard justice that has prevailed in most cultures throughout history... we actually sanctify the very ‘powers and principalities’ that Paul says unduly control the world (Ephesians 3:9-10; 6:12). We stay inside of what some call the “myth of redemptive violence,” which might just be the dominant story line of history. “(The cross) is a statement from God that reality has a cruciform pattern. Jesus was killed in a collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests, and half-truths. caught between the demands of empire and the religious establishment of his day.”

Imagine that, all of reality has a “cruciform pattern.” That means to be “in Christ” is a lifelong, transformational, character changing state of being. We really are ‘crucified with Christ,’ as Paul asserts in Galatians 2:20 – and we die to the old and rise to the new repeatedly throughout our lives. If we Christians begin to believe God’s restorative justice and open ourselves to this cross-shaped reality, such that others could see and experience the transformation that has occurred in us, our parish numbers would swell to over-flowing.

Just when the walls of your house are closing in on you, when you throw the TV remote out the window, and when you have stuffed every magazine from the coffee table in the recycling bin – hope appears on the literary horizon. The Darwin Affair, by Tim Mason is an intelligent thriller that will keep you propped up on your pillows an extra hour at bedtime and have you 13

PAGE TURNERS – Continued skip the newspaper for a chapter or more before work. Honestly, if Charles Dickens is the greatest storyteller of all time, with Arthur Conan Doyle a close second, then Tim Mason may be third.

The story, as evidenced by the title, takes place in 1859 in the wake of Charles Darwin’s publication of his Origin of Species. A cabal of conspirators made up of a jealous scientist, panicked nobleman, and an egotistical prelate contrive to deny Darwin a knighthood by murdering Prince

Albert, Darwin’s champion at court. The villainous assassin ranks as one of the most exacting, dogged, and ruthless in all literature. Doyle’s Professor Moriarty has met his match in the utterly insane Decimus Cobb. The fact that Cobb is a leading London surgeon intensifies the gravity of his murderous tromp through England and the continent.

The hero, Chief Inspector Charles Field, is a mix of Sherlock Holmes and Longmire. Exhibiting few of the social

graces, Field’s fidelity and tenacity actually cost him his job at the terrifying height of the investigation. Two children, his wife, and Victoria’s Albert are nearly in Decimus Cobb’s deadly grasp. Field is working against the clock amidst a clueless collection of people surrounding him in polite society. Here is a Victorian novel that promises to have you feverishly turning the pages.

Making Up for Lost Time Great Commission Society

He loves to discuss the Bible and matters of faith, and he just as much enjoys talking about the challenges of balancing family life with work duties. For me, he is just one of those people you love to see walking towards you on the sidewalk.

by Patrick Gahan

Picturing my friend strolling down the sidewalk, brought to mind Zacchaeus of all people. You remember, he was the guy who climbed up in a tree to catch a better view of Jesus walking down the road into Jericho. When Jesus looked up to see Zacchaeus, he ordered him to come down from the branches of that tree because he planned to stay at Zacchaeus’s house.

Overwhelmed by the unexpected news, Zacchaeus promised to give away half of all his wealth to those in need and to repay all those he had hurt four times over (Luke 19:1-10).

A friend of mine sent me a card with a

one-line message, “I have remembered Christ Church in my will.” I no sooner read his spare note that I picked up the phone to ask him about it. My friend, who is about my age, seemed bemused that I would even bother to contact him. “Pat, it is not that big of a deal. I took a good look at my finances, a hard look at myself, and immediately made an appointment with our attorney. I’m just making up for lost time here.”

I pressed harder as to what he meant by “lost time.” He did not go into detail except to say, “I haven’t always tithed, even though I knew it was the right thing to do. I tithe now, and to make provision for my church at my death is the next right thing to do.”

I appreciate my friend’s witness. It is rare that he and his family are not at worship, 14

Christ’s Entery to Jerusalem with Zacchaeus in a tree, Albani Psalter, English, 13th century

and often they are in Sunday school, too.

When the coast was hard hit by Hurricane Harvey, he jumped into the relief effort with his truck, chainsaw, lopers, and rake.

Zacchaeus is most of us, I imagine.

When we finally take a harder look at our lives, we’re liable to see some fairly dark passages there, and yet, to our utter amazement, we see that Jesus Christ is determined to make his home within us.

Overwhelmed by our unmerited fortune, we, too, should take steps to make up for lost time.

Photo Album Pandemic Playtime with the CEC Youth Ministry

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E P I S C O PA L Christ Episcopal Church 510 Belknap Place San Antonio, TX 78212 www.cecsa.org

The Message (USPS 471-710) is published bi-monthly by Christ Episcopal Church, 510 Belknap Place, San Antonio, TX 78212. Periodical postage paid in San Antonio, TX. Postmaster: Please send address changes to Christ Episcopal Church, 510 Belknap Place, San Antonio, TX 78212. Volume 22, Number 6.

Women’s Bible Study under the trees