The Herald October 23, 2011
From the Rector: A Life of the Heart
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
On the Calendar:
I‟m as disappointed in the dysfunction of our government as anyone, Wednesday, October 19 Federal and State… Sound policy-making is now blatantly being sacri9:15am L’Arche (Chapel) ficed to partisanship…electability being the driving force relative to all 12N Holy Eucharist (chapel) decision-making or lack thereof, the old specter of racism manifested on 4pm St Cecelia Choir 7pm Adult Choir the periphery. Our government seems now so distant from its people it represents, the population‟s voice growing dim, protests notwithstandThursday, October 20 ing. Perhaps that is because corporations now more than ever dictate 12N Al-Anon public policy. The Supreme Court has recently granted corporations the 7pm AA same rights as individuals vis à vis their freedom of speech as that freeSunday, October 23 dom pertains to the influence of elections. Our government, like the cor8am Holy Eucharist porate ethos it increasingly represents, and whose bidding it follows, is growing 9am Breakfast heartless. 9:20am Sunday School 10:30am Holy Eucharist I‟ve just recently been clearing out some boxes that ended up in my office when we Reception following moved here for lack of a better place to put them; and I ran across a box of College stuff… some tests I had done well on…there were a few I didn‟t save, and I found some Tuesday, October 25 3:30pm St Michael Choir of my old college notebooks….one on the Greek Classics….one on Modern British poetry in which we studied, among others, Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins Wednesday, October 26 and William Butler Yeats….And then the one I couldn‟t put down was my notebook 9:15am L’Arche (Chapel) on Romantic poetry, including notes on the works of Wordsworth and Blake; Cole12N Holy Eucharist (chapel) 4pm St Cecelia Choir ridge, Keats and Shelly. I am reminded once again that our artists are our prophets…. 6pm Rector’s Forum they all laud the creative human spirit, its ability to literally form the world in which 6pm Godly Play for Adults it dwells into the fullness of its beauty for which it was and is created… they laud the 7pm Adult Choir power of the imagination to save us from the rude heartlessness that stalks the human enterprise….Imagination, the name of our God-likeness into which we are called to live. In a nutshell our leaders in government suffer from a chronic lack of imagination….Jesus called it hardness of heart. What did our current legislators study in their formative years? Where is the imaginative spirit to serve with equity the good of the whole…the same spirit that formed these United States, a modern articulation of democracy coined by the ancient Greeks…Our legislators then, the so-called founding fathers, would have known the classics, have been educated in the liberal arts tradition, the sole purpose of which was to nourish the imagination which sets free the human spirit to do its singular job, which is to create…..to nurture the joie de vivre of living in an egalitarian world… We live in an age in which education to a much greater degree has become vocational training: business, management, accounting, hotel management, on and on….not that we don‟t need vocational training at some point along the way….but my lament is that we have wandered far in our educational formation from the voices of our prophets, the voices that wake us up to the realization that we are here to serve the beauty that is this world set right….and there are prophets in every discipline….we have wandered afar from their voices, and it is showing up in the way we live together in our society. We just honored one such student of the prophets…one who listened to the voices of the wise….we honored one such follower this week on the Mall of Washington D.C. We honored Martin Luther King, Jr. for living into the collective imagination and thereby changing our world for the better….a man of learning, a man of heart….Nelson Mandela, a man of heart….Mahatma Gandhi, a man of heart…Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee, Tawakkul Karman, the recent Nobel Peace Prize winners, women of heart….Where are the ones among us in this country, ironically founded by learned people of heart….where are they now?….because we languish without them, the worst possibly yet to come in these United States….we languish in their absence…Let us prophesy to these dry bones…that they once again might live and live with brimful hearts.