NOVEMBER 2021 • Volume 23, Number 6
Starting Over: 3 Dinner and a Show: 7 Jolly Old St. Nicholas: 9 Blessings: 11
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
The Rev. Brien Koehler, Associate Rector for Mission and Formation
Family Ministry ...............................9
The Rev. Justin Lindstrom, Associate Rector for Community Formation
Our Church Life .............................11 Great Commission ..........................12
Karen Von Der Bruegge, Director of Vocational Discernment and Pastoral Care
PATRICK GAHAN
Page Turners...................................13
Halleta Heinrich, Director of Family Ministry
Photo Album...................................15
Lily Fenton, Nursery Director Avery Moran, Youth Minister Susan Lindstrom, Director of College Ministry Joshua Benninger, Music Minister & Organist
Front Cover photo: Susanna Kitayama Trunk or Treat at CEC
JENNIFER HOLLOWAY
Back Cover photo: Susanna Kitayama
Jennifer Holloway, Assistant Music Director, Director of Children’s Music & Social Media Manager
More Trunk or Treat fun
Charissa Fenton, Receptionist
Editor: Gretchen Duggan
Robert Hanley, Director of Campus Operations
Live Stream Services: www.cecsa.org/live-stream
Donna Franco, Financial Manager
9:00 & 11:00 a.m. Sundays 11:00 a.m. Wednesdays
Darla Nelson, Office Manager Gretchen Comuzzi Duggan, Director of Communications
HALLETA HEINRICH
Monica Elliott, Executive Assistant to the Rector
In Person Services: Sundays 7:30 a.m. - Rite I 9 & 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. - Rite II Sunday School 10:00 a.m. Christian Education for Children, Youth, and Adults Wednesdays 11 a.m. - Morning Prayer with Communion
Visit us on-line at www.cecsa.org Follow us:
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facebook.com/ChristChurchSATX @christchurchsatx @cecSATX
Elizabeth Martinez, Kitchen Manager Robert Vallejo, Facilities Manager Rudy Segovia, Hospitality Manager Joe Garcia, Sexton MELISSA CARROLL
2021 Vestry: Andy Anderson, Senior Warden Margaret Pape, Junior Warden Lisa Blonkvist
Andy Kerr
Catherine de Marigny David McArthur Meagan Desbrow
Lisa Miller
Rick Foster
Garry Schnelzer
Tobin Hays
Garnett Wietbrock
Ruth and Naomi, South Façade of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington, DC
Starting Over by Patrick Gahan
I dedicate this essay to all those hearty souls who were the first to enroll in our ‘Beginning Again’ class. They are wise to know that we have no deadends in Christ, only opportunities for new starts.
No one travels a straight line through
life. We may fantasize about setting a goal and intrepidly and unwaveringly marching toward it. Few of us are like Mozart (1756-1791), who was fingering tunes on the clavier by age three, touring as a featured artist at eight, and completing 600 pieces of music before his death at age 35. Our experience teaches us that life does not often roll out that way. Boulders may careen onto our path carried by an avalanche of pain, death, divorce, job loss, or health reversals. We can’t walk around these boulders until we sit in their shadow for a time.
More often exits appear along the way luring us from our life’s path. Some exits are diversions, like Circe and her entourage who deterred Odysseus and his men from their way home. Others provide a needed oasis along the way where we can rest and regain our bearings, the home of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha provided that for Jesus. Still other exits lead to the instruction we need to pursue the goal, such as Moses learning to be a shepherd under the guiding hand of his Midianite father-in-law Jethro, which prepared him to shepherd the horde of irascible Israelites.1 Very often, when God calls us down an exit, it is no temporary byway but an entirely new thoroughfare for our life. God unapologetically exchanges our life’s goal with His own. Any Italian schoolchild can recite the opening line of Dante Alighieri’s (1265-1321) Inferno: ‘Midway upon the journey of life I found myself in a forest dark, for the straightforward path had 1 Jethro gives Moses a second, more important lesson in shepherding in Exodus 18:1-27
been lost.’ Dante is considered Italy’s somme poet, “the supreme poet,” because his epic masterpiece tells the truth about a seeker’s life – the straightforward path is often lost.2 A few boulders and many exits are cast along every person’s life, making the straightforward path impossible but not necessarily disadvantageous. God does His best work on those of us who have, at times, been diverted from their path. At the end of high school, I imagined myself to be a sort of Mozart, a straight arrow on the path to notoriety. Putting the world on notice, I bought two books for my high school library just before my graduation that spring. Both were memoirs of war correspondents. The Vietnam War was sputtering to its inglorious end after a decade, which meant all through my school years I had read, watched, and 2 Dante’s 14,000-line narrative poem’s title is The Divine Comedy, or just Commedia, as he named it. Inferno is the first Canto of three that make up the poem – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
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From Our Rector... heard war correspondents. Dug in with the troops, they fearlessly described a world that was both terrible and beguiling. I wanted to be Morley Safer, later of 60 Minutes fame, who changed the conduct of the Vietnam War by reporting honestly on the Marines burning villages in 1965 and disclosed the mystery surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1971. Men like Safer were my Mozarts, fearless knights whose compositions gripped the public with truths untold and beauty bared. My mother, a lover of words, shared her love with me, so that from my primary years I haunted libraries and wrote poems. Even now, the days I write are my best days, even when my lines are bad. The two books I bought for my high school library had not even been cataloged and put on the shelf when God enticed me down an exit ramp. It was summer, and I was counting the days before I left for Trinity of Texas, as it was known then. Texas was an exotic destination for me. My childhood travels circumnavigated Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee but no further. I applied only to colleges with strong journalism departments, and, in those days, Trinity was regarded as one of the best in the nation. In typical male peacock fashion, I often tell others that I attended Trinity because legendary football coach Warren Woodson recruited me, which is true, but not nearly as true as my consuming goal to learn to write. My football feats were unremarkable. My reporting professors, on the other hand, relentlessly drilled the rudiments of the writing craft into me. I did not even know how to type when I arrived on campus. In two years, I could bang out three pages of detailed newspaper copy in ten minutes with no errors. The fall of my junior year, Kay and I married. She had already earned her RN degree and was working at a Cardiac ICU at a major metropolitan hospital. With her $4.65 per hour wage, we were flush with newfound wealth, such that we never managed to spend it all during the early months of our marriage. I transferred to the University of Alabama, with its equally strong journalism program. Barely 4
21, I imagined I could work a year or two with The Birmingham News, graduate to the domestic desk at Newsweek, and then be assigned overseas – perhaps China, since Nixon had recently opened the door. All this was to humor myself. God had dragged me down an exit ramp from my goal two years before. I knew deep down my future would not be in a newsroom.
Gustave Doré’s illustration to Dante’s Inferno. 1857 Plate I: Canto I, Opening lines
Less than a week after my high school graduation, I was working five and a half days a week at Rohn-Vulcan, a steel fabrication plant that manufactured galvanized television towers. During the previous summers, I had worked in commercial construction, which better fit my athletic side and my desire for fresh air and a suntan to feed my adolescent vanity. Nevertheless, I was immensely grateful for the job. With an 8.77% inflation rate and unemployment numbers that would climb from 4.7% to 7.2% in months to come, the U.S. economy was struggling, new construction starts were rare, and teenage jobs were nonexistent. I took what I could get. Fabricating hot galvanized steel was as bad as it sounds. The summer crept by as I was stuck at one loud, dangerous machine for eight hours each day and four hours on Saturday. Paint shed work was the most dreaded assignment. With temperatures rising to over 120°, I repeated the same monotonous action for the entire shift:
grab two newly painted and dried lavahot eight-foot pipes from the overhead conveyor, place them in the box, fill the box with twelve, staple the box, and race to catch the two pipes that were disappearing down the line during the packaging interval. Dante has nothing on this edition of hell. My only consolation was that my tenure with Rohn-Vulcan would end in late August. Most of the men with whom I toiled would work there until they couldn’t. It was in the paint shed that God drove me down the exit ramp. Soaked to the skin and pulling the bronze-coated pipes off the line, I was overcome with the knowledge that God had chosen me to serve Him. (The intense heat coming off the paint line brings the burning bush to mind!) The particulars of the call were not forthcoming. I drove home that night and announced to Kay and my mom what I had experienced, and I added, “God must want me to be a doctor.” If I couldn’t be a foreign correspondent, surely God would put me at doing something equally useful. My mother interjected, “You’re terrible at science,” and in the waning days of summer, I realized God was summoning me to be a priest, which in comparison to being the next Morley Safer seemed as ignominious as a thirty-year sentence at Rhon-Vulcan. The Bible is full of those whom God drew off their chosen road to an exit ramp of His choosing. Amos, the fearless prophet, was drawn from his farm in Judah to lambast the evil empire of Samaria in the north.3 Peter, Andrew, John, and James were fishermen on the Sea of Galilee when Christ calls the four to “follow” a different path. Tellingly, when they thought the coast was clear, they raced to return to their old life.4 Jonah proves to be the most comic example of a Bible personality determinedly set on one path but diverted by God. It takes a tempest and an accommodating fish before he grudgingly sets out on the new road God chose for him.5 This list could go on for several pages. God’s call always demands a 3 Amos 7:14 4 Matthew 4:18-22; John 21:1-3 5 Jonah 1:1-3; 1:11-13; 1:17; 3:10-4:3
From Our Rector... realignment of our life, if not a complete reversal, and the Bible is full of these cloverleaf exits. In a book full of prophets, kings, warriors, and poets, it may come as a surprise that a lowly migrant woman is our adopted saint of reversals. Ruth, the understated heroine of a short book toe-nailed between two epics of the Old Testament, is our Biblical guide for taking a new path. A boulder crashes into her life and an exit leading to a different life appears, yet as with most of God’s exit ramps, it’s far from easy street.
man named Elimelech, from Bethlehem, left the country because of a famine and moved to the land of Moab. With him were his wife, Naomi, and his two sons, Mahlon and Chilion. During the time of their residence there, Elimelech died and Naomi was left with her two sons.
Their plight was compounded by the fact that the two were childless, a badge of dishonor for young wives. Little was holding them to their village in Moab, yet, even with that, it is always easier to stay than move on.
“Better the devil we know,” we glibly say from time to time, but the adage may carry more truth than we care to admit. We contemplate pulling up stakes, moving on, and we experience a tightness in the chest and a wave of nausea. Packing up and moving out is not nearly as bad as reimagining who we will be in our new The Book of Ruth stands at a crossroad circumstances. We can start over at the in the Old Testament. When the same address and still experience early Church fathers settled on the Just as Jesus tossed his penetrating and often grating anxiety. Ask anyone who content and order of the Christian has experienced divorce, death of a agitating parables “alongside” his listeners to spouse or child, become sober after Bible in the fourth century, they placed Ruth immediately after the get them moving in a different direction, Ruth years of addiction, or become a hyper-nationalistic books of Joshua Christian after a lifetime of selfappears beside those thrust down a new path. and Judges and before 1 Samuel gratification and egocentricity. I am as a corrective. They realized reminded of Frederick Buechner’s that neither Israel nor the Church is haunting description of the room known With those first westward steps, the Book called by God to solely strive for its own as The Little Ease in the Tower of London. of Ruth becomes more than a fourpreservation but to be living “lights” for Ironically, just above The Little Ease is the chapter short story sandwiched between others.6 When Ruth, the migrant Moabite Chapel of St. John, a luminous space much larger ones in the Bible. The book woman, takes the new path to Bethlehem, where the Knights of Bath kept an allbecomes a parable. “Parable” in the Greek night vigil before marching out to defend she sounds reveille for both Jews and Christians to reawaken to their true calling is parabolē, meaning to “throw alongside.” the realm. The Norman chapel is a noble, Just as Jesus tossed his penetrating and and turn on the lights for those who dwell in light-filled place. William the Conqueror often agitating parables “alongside” his darkness. began its construction in 1066, and its listeners to get them moving in a different chapel summons the most altruistic and direction, Ruth appears beside those Ruth does not choose to start over. The heroic parts of humanity. But underneath thrust down a new path. The beginning untimely death of her husband, coupled that airy Norman chapel sits The Little of Ruth’s story alerts us that forging this with the death of her father-in-law, Ease, “the most terrible of all the tower’s new path will not be easy. Following their Naomi’s husband and the patriarch of the dungeons. It has a heavy oak door that mother-in-law Naomi, Ruth and Orpah family, thrusts her on the road to survival. locks out all light and ventilation. It take the road west from Moab, in present The husband of Orpah, Ruth’s sister-inmeasures only four feet square by four feet day Jordan, to Bethlehem, a route that is law and her contemporary, dies during high so that a prisoner has no way either mountainous and foreboding, especially this time as well. All three husbands were to stand upright in it or to lie down at full for three unaccompanied women. Equally immigrant Israelites, complicating their length. There is almost no air to breathe collective misfortune. A very large boulder foreboding for Ruth and Orpah is the in it, almost no room to move… The Little fact that while Bethlehem is Naomi’s crashed into this small, intermarried Ease is a place of torment, but if you live ancestral home, they are Moabites with no there long enough, it eventually becomes family in Moab. No safety net existed connection to Judah and its odd religion. for women in the ancient middle east. home. If you manage to escape it, where Trudging up steep inclines and through The curtain fell on Ruth’s life as a wife in do you go next, who do you become rocky passes, while avoiding thieves and Moab. So abrupt was the triple-tragedy next?”7 worse, will prove easier than leaving ending her old life that she had little their home. True, in that ancient society, recourse but to start walking into an Buechner insists that each one of us is the two young women’s houses, lands, unknown future. created by God as Chapels of St. John, full and livestock would have been divided of light and hope to offer the world, until amongst the males in the clan, a practice Long ago when judges ruled in Israel, a 7 Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets (San Francisco: still common in many parts of the world. 6 Isaiah 60:3; Matthew 5:14-16 Harper, 1991), 45, 53. These young men, Mahlon and Chilion, married girls of Moab, Orpah and Ruth. But later, both men died, so that Naomi was left alone, without her husband or sons. She decided to return to Israel with her daughtersin-law, for she had heard that the Lord had blessed his people by giving them good crops again. Ruth 1:1-7 The Living Bible
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From Our Rector... we become captured in a shrunken version of ourselves. The deep-down unease that grips our gut greets us in the morning and visits again within the night watches when our guard is down. Tossing back and forth on our bed, we catch sight of the telescoped person we’ve become that our child self would not recognize. We fear that if we remain in this cramped state, we will end up like King Lear, blind and dying of a broken heart over what he’s become and the light he shut out from others and from himself.8 On the other hand, if we dare clamber out of our cramped personal prison, we will become like Zacchaeus, who climbs a Sycamore tree to catch sight of Jesus. Zacchaeus is described as a ‘small man,’ which describes his stature, but much more so his smallness bluntly defines what he has become while amassing his fortune by exploiting others. When the little, detested man climbs the tree that day, he has decided to turn on the lights and start over. Jesus sees him and gives him the courage to climb down and make steps in a completely new direction, so that neither his fortune, nor any other encumbrance of his life’s status quo can hold him back.9 We can step out like Zacchaeus, but we need not do so alone. Ruth comes beside all of us bravely striking out from what we have known to the strange world we don’t. She is the traveling companion of those who have admitted their lives have shrunk to proportions unacceptable to ourselves and to God. I must sound an alarm here. We need not be in a detestable or exploitative occupation to be stuck. We can be mired in endeavors that are perfectly acceptable and applauded by our family and peers. St. Francis comes to mind. Born into a wealthy family of textile merchants, Francis’s desire to become a knight to defend his city of Assisi was enthusiastically supported by both his kin and neighbors. Captured by the enemy during his first crusade, God spoke into the silence of the despairing prison and spirited Francis away from the celebrity life he had been given to the servant life to which he was called. So determined was Francis to break with his old life that he 8 King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3 9 Luke 19:1-10
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stripped off his finely woven nobleman’s clothes in the middle of Assisi’s town square and stood naked before the entire town. Ironically, the expectations of his former life felt far heavier to Francis than the longed-for lighter life to which God was summoning him.10 Stripping off the old life was not embarrassing but liberating. Being called to a lighter life has nothing to do with leisure. Moving from the status quo of our lives may prove to be a much more arduous day-to-day life. Ask any executive who left his business to teach or to farm or to become a nurse. I’ve watched my wife go out the door in the early AM to serve as a registered nurse in hospitals, nursing homes, and surgery centers for forty-six years. Her work is physically taxing, mentally demanding, and emotionally draining – especially in this time of the Coronavirus. But Kay is called to her work, and when I kiss her on the front steps at 4:55 in the morning, I notice there is a lightness in her bearing as she makes her way to the car. While after almost a half-century in her vocation, the unreasonable hours and unequitable remuneration can be disappointing, her sense of purpose has only grown.
Once we turn our lives over to God, we will begin to see the landscape of our existence more clearly, and we will set different priorities in the context of the lives we already inhabit.
Of course, most of us won’t start over by changing our occupations. Once we turn our lives over to God, we will begin to see the landscape of our existence more clearly, and we will set different priorities in the context of the lives we already inhabit. Not even Zacchaeus changed professions, he instead came to realize under Christ’s rule that he could make his living as a tax collector in far different 10 Matthew 11:28-29
way.11 Two dear friends in the parish are attorneys, both with active and demanding trial dockets. If I phone either one of them because a member of the church is in need, they never turn a deaf ear. Both have stepped up to help in enormously sacrificial ways time and again. Then, against all expectations, they thank me. Why? Because Christ has led them to reprioritize their days. To start again, always necessitates a reshuffling. God cannot liberate us if we serve other gods – especially if those gods are ourselves.12 We must revisit what’s at stake. Making a new start is not a matter of pacifying God or getting a pass into heaven. No, making this new start will determine whether we remain shrunken editions of ourselves fit only for The Little Ease, or we become God’s dream of us as a light-filled Chapel of St. John. Fear keeps us pent up in the dark. Courage thrusts us toward the light. Musing about courage, my thoughts go to my friend Wendell Peden, who, at 94, was still willing to start over. Wendell moved to San Antonio with his wife Carol to be close to their daughter, Pam Kittrell. Except for his stint in the military, Wendell served as a veterinarian in South Dakota for his entire vocational life. His truck was well-known along the county roads, paved and unpaved, as he went from one farm to another attending to livestock of all sizes and with all manner of maladies and birthing complications. Carol was Wendell’s dispatcher, directing him from the confines of her wheelchair to the next most pressing call. Afflicted with Multiple Sclerosis, Carol was relegated to a wheelchair for over fifty years, and yet, because of Wendell’s devoted love and care for his bride, she never suffered a single bed sore. I was able to see their romance up close because I visited Wendell every Friday for the last four or five years of his life. In their last years, the two made their home at Morningside Manor, where Wendell drove the nurses and aides absolutely nuts with his assiduous demands for Carol’s care. His life was wrapped up in hers in a way that some fortunate married couples experience. I marveled at 11 Luke 19:8-9 12 Exodus 20:3
From Our Rector... their devotion to one another. Therefore, when Carol died, I imagined that Wendell would quickly follow her in death. I was wrong. Wendell grieved the loss of Carol terribly. A giant boulder had landed squarely in the middle of his path, and on Fridays when her name was mentioned, he would choke up and fall silent (which was a miraculous occurrence for that effusive veterinarian!). Wheelchair bound and dependent on portable oxygen at that point, Wendell bravely restarted his life centering on another of his great loves – bison. During the years of his work in South Dakota, Wendell’s fascination with American Bison grew, not only as God’s uniquely fashioned animal for the Great Plains, but also as a symbol of what is best about our young nation. He carefully acquired one of the largest purebred American Bison herds in the U.S. He tested, treated, tagged, and attended the massive beasts better than most people care for their AKC registered house dogs. Brucellosis, a bacterial disease affecting both man and beast, was his main adversary, and Wendell staged one assault after another on this sickness that is near impossible to eradicate from bison herds. Wendell’s purpose in growing and protecting his bison was not for his own edification, nor was it to enrich his family. His dream was to give the entire herd to one of the most beleaguered
Native American tribes in his South Dakota. Wendell had already secured an arrangement with South Dakota State University to oversee the health of his bison as their study herd. He figured if a tribe accepted his gift of the bison, a great symbol of their past, and the herd ranged freely on its reservation land, the people’s vision of themselves would rise. Wendell worked tirelessly to accomplish this before his death and gave me excited, almost breathless, reports every Friday afternoon. He died in Pam’s home during the peak of the first wave of Covid-19 with no takers for his gift. “Tribal politics are interminably slow,” he assured me week after week, attempting to assuage my disappointment as well as his own.
just as they pull up their collars against the artic winter’s jet stream. So, I was surprised that Wendell made his home in the Episcopal Church in his latter years. I think that’s because our church is comfortable with change; we shepherd those who are starting over. In that sense, the Episcopal Church is like Naomi, Ruth’s mother-in-law, about whom I’ve said very little in this essay. Nonetheless, it was Naomi who invites Ruth and Orpah to accompany her on an uncertain journey to a new beginning, and it will be Naomi who is generous and strong enough to encourage them to return to their lives in Moab.13 Either way, Naomi shepherds her daughters into the unforeseen future they must now inhabit.
While I lamented Wendell’s death as a friend and companion, I harbored no regrets about his life. Like Ruth, he started his life over during great sorrow and with no promises of success. He lived in a nursing home and yet he refused to shrink down his life to fit his tiny room and confining wheelchair.
If Ruth is the patron saint of those starting over, Naomi is the Episcopal Church’s angel of change. The landslides scattering boulders across our well-worn paths have come or will come. Family storms, vocational maelstroms, and viral earthquakes reroute our carefully scripted roadmaps. We spy an exit ahead, but we fear where it leads. What will happen to us if we take it, and who will we be in this new place? Keep walking, because the Episcopal Church is a pilgrim people. Starting over is what we do.
Wendell was one of those sturdy Lutherans of the Midwest that you come across in a Willa Cather novel. They stand erect and unmoved as a silo against the tempests that rage across the treeless plains. They roll up their sleeves in the oven of infernal summer heat,
13 Ruth 1:11-14
Children’s Christmas Pageant and Annual Parish Christmas Dinner Sunday, December 5 5 p.m.
www.cecsa.org/parish-christmas-dinner 7
Lessons and Carols: A Memoir and a Few Facts
Music Ministry by Jennifer Holloway
Lessons and Carols has been a part of my
life for as long as I can remember. From the age of three I have sung in a Lessons and Carols service almost every year of my life. Even when I was living in Chicago, I made sure to fly home in time to sing in the Saturday rehearsal and the beautiful service. And no Christmas Eve is complete for me without listening to the broadcast of the King’s College Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols while making last minute holiday preparations, a family practice that stems from my parents’ love of the service (as well as pretty much anything that comes from England.) I love so many things about Christ Episcopal Church, but being able to sing in this service and continue this wonderful tradition is like the cherry on top. A very big cherry! The music and traditions of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany reside in an incredibly special place in my heart. As a child, I always loved lighting our family advent wreath every evening before dinner. We would sing “This little light of mine” and Natalie Sleeth’s “Light One Candle” as we took turns lighting our assigned candles. These moments and songs have been imprinted upon my heart. Now, as a mother, I look forward every year to unpacking the very same carved wood advent wreath that my parents have so lovingly passed on to my family and lighting the candles as we sing the same songs we sang when I was a child. There have been moments in the past few CEC Lessons and Carols when I have looked 8
around and gotten a bit overcome seeing my two children singing with me. Even if they do not develop the same love (perhaps obsession) for this service as I have, I know these moments will always hold a special place in their hearts as well. I am certain that their experiences being active participants in the services and in the life of the church, as choristers, acolytes, and readers, will give them a certainty that they are a vital part of the church’s life and will always be able to find a home at church. For someone who has grown up with such a love for the Lessons and Carols service, most of my knowledge has been anecdotal, derived from stories I have been told by people who have been lucky enough to have attended the service at King’s College (bucket list item!), conversations I have had with other choir directors, or from listening to the BBC broadcast of the service. For instance, I have known for years that, at the King’s College Lessons and Carols service, the soloist who sings the first verse of “Once in royal David’s city” does not find out until right before the
service begins that he will be singing said solo. (I am not sure any of our CEC choir members would go for that arrangement.) I have also known that the congregation at King’s College is told, verbally and in the bulletin, that they should be silent during the organ prelude and postlude, they should only cough or talk during the service if absolutely necessary and are given instructions on how to stand to minimize noise. To remedy my lack of knowledge about the roots of this much beloved service, I decided I needed to do a bit of research. Down the rabbit hole I went and thoroughly enjoyed my adventure. I have always assumed that Lessons and Carols was purely an invention of King’s College, Cambridge. But we all know what happens when we assume! While Lessons and Carols is certainly most associated with King’s College, the service did not originate there. In fact, the first L&C at King’s College was in 1918, but on this side of the pond, Brown University had begun its tradition of a Lesson and Carols
service two years earlier in 1916.1 The actual creation of the service of Nine Lessons with Carols occurred almost 40 years prior, at Truro Cathedral in Cornwall, England. On Christmas Eve in 1880, the Bishop of the Diocese of Truro, Edward White Benson (who would later become the Archbishop of Canterbury), developed the service that included nine readings from the Bible and nine carols sung between readings.2 Since the cornerstone of Truro Cathedral had just been laid and construction had begun, this very first Lessons and Carols service was held in 1 Larsen, Timothy, and Martyn Percy. “Anglicanism.” Oxford Handbook of Christmas, Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2020, pp. 157–157. 2 McGrath, Alister E. “The Life of Faith.” Christianity: An Introduction, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, 2006, pp. 293–293.
a temporary wooden shed.3 Honestly, I prefer our Lessons and Carols under the oaks and lights we enjoyed last year to the thought of singing in a wooden shed. While the readings have been changed a bit from the original format, with many churches (CEC included) choosing to read seven lessons rather than nine, elements of the original 1880 service remain. “O come, all ye faithful” and Handel’s “For Unto Us a Child is Born” and the “Hallelujah” chorus from The Messiah were 3 Gray, Christopher (29 November 2013). “How Truro created Christmas musical history.” The Guardian. theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2013/nov/29/truro-nine-lessons-carols-christmas-history Retrieved 14, October 2021.
all a part of the 1880 service.4 Churches around the world of many different denominations have been celebrating Lessons and Carols for many years,5 and I am blessed to have been a member of two churches with a similarly long tradition. (How amazing it is that we were all able to continue this tradition last year, in the middle of the pandemic.) I eagerly anticipate December every year, preparing for and participating in Lessons and Carols, but this year the knowledge that I am participating in a tradition that spans back over 140 years will make this beautiful and moving celebration even more meaningful. 4 Gray, Christopher. “How Truro created Christmas musical history.” 5 Larsen, Timothy, and Martyne Percy. “Anglicanism.”
An Old-Fashioned Christmas
CEC Family Ministry by Halleta Heinrich
You are invited to be part of an Old-
Fashioned Advent/Christmas Celebration on Sunday, December 5 with our Children’s Christmas Pageant “Santa’s Favorite Story” presented at 5:00 p.m. in the church followed by the Parish Christmas Dinner in the Parish Hall. It’s fitting that the children are presenting “Santa’s Favorite Story” this year on St. Nicholas Eve, since St. Nicholas Day is December 6. The basis for this year’s Christmas Pageant is the children’s classic “Santa’s Favorite Story - Santa Tells the Story of the First Christmas” by Hisako Aoki and illustrated by Ivan Gantschev. Fifth graders will play the starring roles of the Nativity characters, 3-year-olds will be the sheep at the manger, 4-year-olds through Kindergarteners will be the woodland and manger animals, first and second grade
Santa’s Favorite Story from 2014 with Bishop Frey as St. Nicholas
girls will be Christmas angels, and first and second grade boys will be Christmas stars. Third graders will be Santa’s helpers, and fourth graders will be the shepherds of the sheep. Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus will be here to help tell the story along with sixth grade narrators.
After the pageant all are invited to the Parish Hall to enjoy a traditional Christmas dinner together as a Church Family. St. Nicholas themed treats will be served, and prizes given to the children as a thank you for their performance. 9
So Many Blessings Top left: Esther and her daughter, Blessing; top right: Esther in her piggery; lower left: The Village Life tapestry; lower right: Esther teaches stitching
by Halleta Heinrich
I was surprised by a beautiful gift given
to the Children’s Ministry by our gracious Christ Church members in August – a very large and colorful embroidery of Village Life in Uganda where we have missions and where the Threads of Blessing ministry has flourished. This detailed embroidery was the fruit of the labor of one year by a Ugandan woman named Esther Byaruhanga. She is a witness of love and perseverance – love for Christ and her family whom she supports through her creative gift. I want to thank all who granted my wish to have this beautiful work of art hung in a place of honor in our Children’s Building – the FMC. It was at the CEC Missions Fair at Christ Church last year that I first saw this embroidery and voiced, “I wish I could have this for the FMC! The children would love it!” But I asked the price, and knew it was not within my budget. Little did I know that there were those present who heard my wish and made plans to fulfill it. 10
I want to share this testimony from Esther, the creator of our embroidery. What a wonderful lady she is!
With Gratitude, Halleta
“Dear friends, I am privileged to be part of Threads of Blessing, which has changed my life, family, children, and husband. I am also grateful to God for the gift of the hands he has given me. Through Threads of Blessing, my children are in schools because we can pay school fees; we bought three acres of land and planted tree seedlings. They are now three years old. We have also constructed a permanent house using money from Threads of Blessing. I had no hope that my children would attend good schools, but God has done it for me through Threads of Blessing. I use the gift to teach other women how to stitch.”
“Blessings to Halleta for appreciating the works of my hands. I pray for more blessings for all the ministry she does to help children in Christ Church... This is my testimony about ToB funds. The village piece which was recently sold, it took me one complete year to finish it... I thank the Lord for the money I received. I first deducted the tithe. The remaining balance was so helpful on my side. I had started [a]piggery project in which the pigs’ house had no roof... Praise the Lord that when I received the funds from ToB, I used part of it to buy iron sheets for roofing.
Recently I spoke with Helen Schnelzer, a leader of Threads of Blessing, and she was delighted to let me know that Esther has built a “piggery” and bought pigs to raise on her land as an additional means of support. This addition was made possible partly through the purchase of our new embroidery. Come see it! It is hung at the end of the first floor Tomlin Room in the FMC. We will have an official blessing of the embroidery soon with our children present.
Here is a bit more of Esther’s letter:
Still, I am really blessed. After roofing, another portion of the funds was used to secure a concrete water tank with a holding capacity of 8000 litres. It will be used for harvesting rain water when the Creator gives it to us. The project is in the village. The water source is far from our home. It is 3 kilometers away. So it has been so tiresome for us carrying water from the well for both human and pigs. Glory be to God that ToB made things easy for me through the funds I received I was able to buy the water tank. God is good and faithful always.”
It is more blessed to give... CEC Outreach by Melissa Carroll
Many families struggle with not enough year around, but something about the holidays makes the want especially haunting.
“Thanksgiving becomes another worry struggling families have on top of other monthly bills, basic necessities and other stressors,” said Brittany Reyes, social worker at Longfellow Middle School. “To relieve the added stress of the holidays by providing Thanksgiving dinner is a beautiful gift and can mean the difference between a stressful holiday season and one spent making beautiful memories with loved ones.” Without the resources of having family in San Antonio, a single mother of three boys works hard to keep their expenses in line. Living on a fixed income, the mother keeps a strict budget to cover the basics.
VIA is their only means of transportation. She was struggling a bit in mid-October because she broke a toe which made it challenging to walk or ride the bus to pick up her youngest from school, but she managed. Occasionally, she plans trips to area parks so the family can have an affordable fun day out. With every penny accounted for, the holidays can be a little stressful because of extra costs. Being able to have a turkey dinner provided for her will alleviate some of that stress. “I think this news will be a blessing,” said Jefferson social worker Gloria Hulshof. Gloria adds that the boys are succeeding academically. “This past year, one of the boys was able to get into a program that allows him to work on his high school diploma as well as college credits,” said Hulsof. “Her oldest son is passing with very high grades in all his classes and has a plan for his future after graduation.” Some might see turkey and the sides as
Then Jesus said to his host, “when you give a banquet, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” Luke 14 12:14
an unnecessary luxury, but for families that undergo the stress that comes with financial difficulties, it is huge to be able to maintain their home traditions and their dignity. “There is deep emotional meaning in what it means to belong to a family,” Brittany explained. “When families are able to make good, happy memories, this creates more positive mental health outcomes for adult family members and children alike.” For 23 years, Christ Church has distributed turkeys and sides to food pantry clients. A year ago, with the development of food support to our school families, those families also received turkeys. The food pantry anticipates distributing food for 250 families this month. Parishioners are asked to donate the sides to make the meal complete. “We encourage our Christ Church families to include their children in picking out the sides,” said Tina Honsaker, who manages the food pantry, “so they can learn how to give at a young age.”
Thanksgiving Bag Deadline November 17, 2021
It is time for the 21 Annual Food Pantry Christmas Luncheon. CEC parishioners are st
invited to volunteer to serve our guests and to provide holiday home-baked desserts such as cookies, brownies, etc... and to assist with various crafts for the children. Parishioners are encouraged to participate in this event with our guests. Come and be blessed! For information, please contact Tina Honsaker.
21st Annual Food Pantry Christmas Lunch Saturday, December 4 11
Keeping Tradition Alive
Great Commission Society by Patrick Gahan
At the onset of every spring, Captain
Tom Cox and his wife Helen would phone to ask, “Do we have enough funds to buy the bicycles?” Their calls were as predictable as the change of watch on the destroyer, the USS Edson and submarine tender, the L.Y. Spear, where the Captain once served. Their abiding concern was the bicycles we buy each James Madison Elementary student who achieves perfect attendance for the entire school year. Until Covid interrupted us, Christ Church bought a bike, helmet, and lock for persevering students who avoided all absences from school. The prize is quite an incentive for these hardworking students from low-income families; therefore, the church is “on the hook” each May for over 100 bikes! The Captain and Helen knew this and delighted in making the children’s summer dreams come true. 12
Just as predictable were the Captain’s calls the second week of November and the fourth week of May in preparation for Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day. “I’m calling to ask that the Navy Hymn be sung at our celebration on Sunday.” Of course, Josh, a military man himself, had already added the selection to Sunday’s liturgy. Captain Cox’s face lit up like a bonfire when the organ let out the first notes of the Rev. John Bacchus Dykes’s 19th century masterpiece. These days, when I try to sing the first lines of the “Captain’s song” – Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless waves – I find myself getting choked up at the absence of my friend, who would stand in ramrod attention during the singing of all four verses. So, it lightened my heart when Helen phoned a few weeks ago and invited me to her new home at The Forum. She had made the decision to give a significant testamentary gift at her death to be divided between the Outreach and Music endowments. I should not have been surprised. Helen has spent long hours sizing, folding, and hanging the clothes to be given at Sidewalk Saturday, and she now
works with those preparing our emergency food relief for elementary aged children served through our Snack-Pack ministry. “Tom loved music and the fact that our church was serving the most needy in our city. I feel the same way. So, it makes me happy that our giving can continue even after our deaths. We love Christ Church.”
PAGE TURNERS – From the Rector’s Book Stack The walls were
of discovery.
closing in on Ornithologist Caroline Van Hemert. Day after day studying the mutations of Chickadee’s beaks, she felt as if she was suffocating. Then one day, after a string of stifling, unsuccessful experiments, she remembered her father’s repeated command to her when she was a child, “Get outside.” Arriving home that night, she elatedly told her husband Pat they needed to take off on a great adventure before they were unable to do so. The plan was hatched to traverse 4,000 miles from the Washington rain forest above Bellingham, WA all the way to the Arctic Circle and continue to the Pacific Ocean where Russia and the U.S. almost touch. The Sun is a Compass: A 4,000-Mile Journey into the Alaskan Wilds is Caroline Van Hemert’s chronicle of the couple’s determination to “get outside.” The two strike out on March 2012 and arrive at their terminal destination, Kotzebue, AK in August, just as the Arctic winter is setting in. Wandering over uncharted and untraveled territory, they journeyed by rowboat, ski, raft, canoe, on foot, and often on all fours. Polar bears, grizzlies, black bears, landslides, perilous seas, and starvation stalk them repeatedly. On the other hand, they are surrounded by thousands of caribou, millions of migrating birds, and magnificent night skies.
The Battle of the Que Son Valley in 1967 was Vietnam’s Antietam. More Americans died in that campaign than any other during the long nineteen years of the Vietnam War. Rather than write another reenactment or assessment of the battle, Marine Captain Otto Lehrack, who served two tours in Vietnam, lets the Marines speak for themselves in his Road of 10,000 Pains: The Destruction of the 2nd NVA Division by the U.S. Marines, 1967. To read the book is like being dug in along Route 534 outside of Da Nang in the hellfire of those October days. Some of the quotes are instructive. Lt. Ben Drollinger said, “The Marines have always been called the ‘American Spartans’ because they always fight with older equipment and expect none of the amenities that U.S. Army units enjoy.” Some are terrifying. PFC Patrick Mosey offered, “I heard the spoon of the grenade go, and I was grabbing my nuts. The grenade went off, and I caught a piece of it just under my rib cage. I shot a single round with one hand, and the NVA’s sandals were right in front of my face.” And some are gruesomely honest. A retired NVA officer matter-of-factly declared to the author, “In the Que Son Valley in 1967, we killed more Americans than at any time or place during the war.”
Blistered feet, raw hands, empty stomachs, blinding snow, and disorienting fog are their daily companions, and vicariously, they became mine, too. The book is a memoir of a young marriage as much as it is a travelogue, and it magnifies the understanding that comes through adversity and exhilaration, which is the trek all married couples must make. This is the best non-fiction book I read during the summer, and I often awoke in the middle of the night just to walk a few more miles with the two. Caroline and Pat renew my faith in the strength of love and the delight
Jack Walters, a distinguished Marine himself, insisted I read this book. “We need to know what our boys went through,” he said, “and it was not for naught, because when it looked as if the day was lost, the Marines turned the tide of battle to vanquish the NVA. Thus, the book is aptly named. It was the Greek (Achaean) King Agamemnon in the Iliad who raised the battle cry, the “pain of 1,000 men” to repulse the Trojans and put the Greek warriors on the road to victory. Any modern who has read Augustine’s
Confessions, finds it laughable that the prolifically writing saint agonizes over his teenage theft of pears. In Book Two, Augustine, by then ensconced in mid-life, confesses his adolescent
crime: ‘There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night – having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was – a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the pigs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves.’ (II, iv, 9) Egad, I was arrested at the same age for sneaking in the back entrance of the Thunderbird Drive-in with a trunk full of Budweiser. But our venerable Algerian saint is not as interested in ranking offenses as he is with the question of why we continue, long after childhood, to speak evil words, do evil actions, and harbor evil thoughts. To this Augustine wrote, Unde hoc malum– “Whence this evil”? or “Where does evil come from?” This is the question that drives Alan Jacobs’s highly readable, wide-ranging book Original Sin: A Cultural History. Jacob’s work is a treat for the mind, as he approaches the question we hold at arm’s length, “What’s wrong with us?” Approaching the question from the scientific, philosophical, historical, and theological viewpoints, Jacobs fearlessly examines the catalog of humanity’s sin. He takes us to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s gulags, to Robert Owen’s failed utopian community, to Gregor Mendel’s genetic experiments with pea plants, to C.S. Lewis’s WWI nightmarish trench warfare, to Philip Zimbardo’s terrifying prison experiments with Stanford students, and all the way down to Dante Alighieri’s nine rings of hell. Braver still, Jacobs exposes America’s Original Sin – slavery, with its foundations, not solely in the cotton fields of the south, but fortified by eminent 13
PAGE TURNERS – Continued Harvard professor Louis Agassiz’s (18071873) theory of polygenism. Armed with the false notion of scientific racism, eugenics is a short step away. Indiana, in fact, enacted the first horrifying eugenics law in 1907, years ahead of Hitler’s and Xi Jinping’s dark machinations. Knowing that, I returned repeatedly to Solzhenitsyn’s (1918-2008) own admission of evil as I read Jacob’s book. Solzhenitsyn, while serving his eight years in the frozen gulag, wrote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through all human hearts.” The celebrated Russian novelist and philosopher knew that given the chance he could have become as evil as the guards who tortured him. I am conceding to the harsh fact that we only have so much reading time. This concession descended on me when I was 180 pages into a novel that I had bought with highest expectations but that bored me senseless by its cardboard plot and plastic characters. I put it down. Kay rushed to my aid with a midnight blue paperback in hand, “Pat, you will love this book.” The book, The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje (pron. On-dah-chee), is the coming-of-age story of three preadolescent Ceylonese boys who make the 21-day cruise from Colombo, Sri Lanka to London in the mid-1950’s. Unsupervised and free to roam the massive liner Oransay, the three are reminiscent of Huck Finn and Jim rafting down the Mississippi – utterly free during those twenty-one days on the water. Four pages in, I was captivatingly drawn into the company of the trio and relished their every antic on shipboard. Michael, nicknamed “Mynah” by the other two, narrates the voyage, and deftly fast-forwards the reader into his present life and then back again. The centerpiece of the plot is the Cat’s Table, the table purposely placed furthest from the Captain’s Table dining entourage and 14
other polite company. At the Cat’s Table, the three are surrounded by the most eccentric, mysterious, and interesting passengers on the Oronsay. I can compare the novel to A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, except Ondaatje is the better writer, having won the Booker Prize for The English Patient. This novel is worth the time spent! I finished it and wanted to cast off again. An apology, from the Greek apologia, is a verbal defense of a philosophy, position, or conduct. Christianity, being an innately rational religion by virtue of its Hellenistic heritage, has a long line of apologists, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Blaise Pascal, and Lee Strobel included. Thanks to the Blonkvists and the Hardins, I was given two new books of apology, whose authors defend our faith amidst the anti-Christian culture in which we live. Well Versed: Biblical Answers to Today’s Tough Issues is written by Jim Garlow, the former Senior Pastor of Skyline Church, San Diego, and Seeds of the Word: Finding God in the Culture is written by Robert Barron, a Roman Catholic Bishop of Los Angeles, and the Founder of Word on Fire Ministries. While the two do not always cover the same ground, it is encouraging that they very often stand together on the issues arising from the secular culture. So much of Garlow’s witness stems from his love of the four children he and his wife have adopted. For instance, when school counselors insist on counseling his children without him or his wife present, he kindly refuses. He will not have a stranger speaking new messages into his children’s lives without his knowledge. His stance has infuriated a succession of school officials.
Garlow is kind, even amongst those who profess hate for him. One of the best excerpts in the book is when he joins a march to the Supreme Court supporting traditional marriage. When kneeling to pray, he suffers a barrage of slurs but refuses to react in like manner. What is most helpful about Garlow’s book is that it gives the reader avenues to answer the Church’s most vehement cultural critics to include The First Amendment, Universities, School Choice, The Judiciary, Gender Identity, and so on. Barron, on the other hand, offers a Christian perspective on popular culture. An avid movie-goer, he critiques their themes to present the Christian message. It will surprise no one that a favorite chapter for me is True Grit and the Everlasting Arms. Also, I appreciated The Hunger Games: A Prophecy and Moneyball and Spiritual Leadership. Barron is a reader, too. I was drawn to his essay on The Gospel According to The Hobbit. Like Garlow, Barron, is engaged in the great political questions: Why It Matters That Our Democracy Trusts in God, Seeing Political Corruption with Biblical Eyes, and Gay Marriage and the Breakdown of Moral Argument. The best section of the book is the last where Barron addresses those challenges that best all Christians: If You Want to Be a Good Person, It Does Matter What You Believe, The Acts We Perform, The People We Become, and (my favorite) Your Life Is Not About You. It’s not, and both these authors get that. While I do not concur with all their points, their passionate defenses are such that… no apology is needed! Call me a skeptic, but I was suspicious when I received a book from Amazon with nary a note inside. I feared the book, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, by Amanda Ripley, was a biased political tome given to move me one way or the other. I was wrong. For one, Ripley is a highly regarded writer for The Atlantic
Photo Album
and The Washington Post. For another, her reporting is carefully balanced. What’s more, she writes so well that I was absorbed from page one. Ripley’s aim is to alert Americans to the avenues that lead to high conflict as well as the way to the exit ramps. High conflict is conflict that becomes self-perpetuating and all-consuming, in which almost everyone ends up worse off. Typically, it is an us-versus-them conflict. Three distinctive attributes of high conflict include: One, the conflicts are binary, that is between two groups and often over only two prevailing options. Two, the conflicts breed groups on either side, such that group identity becomes more important than the conflict itself. And three, because the draw of group identity is so strong,
people on both sides, end up in the tar pits, completely stuck and unable to escape. If that sounds like where we are at this point in American history, that is because we are. Ripley’s book is hopeful, however, and carefully reporting on longstanding binary conflicts in England, California, Chicago, Columbia, and New York City, she shows the way out of the tar pits. If gang members from Chicago and guerillas from the jungles of Columbia can find a way out, so can we. To punctuate that fact, Ripley ends with the reconciliation of guntoting right-wing Michigan prison guards with a group of hyper-progressive New York Jews just three years ago. If they can do it, well… 15
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 23, Number 6.
Peter Pan and gang looking scary!