The Advent: The Storytelling Issue

ISSUE

1 2015

MADE IN BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

THE

ADVENT A MAGAZINE OF GOOD NEWS

THE STORY TELLING ISSUE

C A L L I G R A PH Y C O U RT E SY O F E M I LY C O E

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PUBLISHER

Andrew C. Pearson, Jr. Matthew C. Schneider Tom Martin W. Brandon Bennett Hawley M. Schneider Mary Berkeley Pritchard Ivy Grimes Charles R. Ritch II

EDITOR ART DIRECTOR A S S I STA N T E D I TO R PHOTOGRAPHER COPY EDITOR E D I TO R I A L A S S I STA N T PROOFREADER

VESTRY James L. Priester ■ SE NIOR WA RDE N Stephen K. Greene ■ JUNIOR WA RDE N James A. Bradford ■ CLE RK Hewes T. Hull ■ TRE ASURE R James S. Andrews; Frederick W. Bromberg; Frances A. Cade; Michael S. Denniston; Denson N. Franklin III; Harold H. Goings; Stephen K. Greene; Judy F. Greenwood; Mary R. Hanson; John W. Hargrove; Troy C. Haas; Leland Hull, Jr.; Julia W. King; J. Bailey Knight III; Todd W. Liscomb; Kathryn S. Logue; David S. McKee, Jr.; J. Claiborne Morris, Sr.; S. Britton Neal; Katherine J. Nielsen; Paul G. Petznick; Fontaine H. Pope; Oscar M. Price IV; Michael T. Sansbury; Jackson R. Sharman III; Caroline M. Springfield; David G. Tanner; Frank W. Tynes; Robin A. Wade III; Louise W. Yoder

CLERGY Andrew C. Pearson, Jr. ■ DE A N R. Craig Smalley ■ CANON PASTOR AND DAY SCHO OL CHAPL AIN Joseph A. Gibbes ■ CA NON FOR CHRISTIA N E DUCATION Deborah R. Leighton ■ CA NON MISSIONE R A ND DIRE CTOR OF WOM EN’ S M INIST R IES Matthew C. Schneider ■ CA NON FOR PA RISH LIFE A ND EVA NGELISM Stephen J. McCarthy ■ CUR ACY FE LLOW Adam A. Young ■ CUR ACY FE LLOW Katherine P. Jacob ■ DE AC ON Samuel Mugisha ■ CLE RGY ASSO CIATE

THE ADVENT is a trademark of the Cathedral Church of the Advent. Copyright © 2015 by the Cathedral Church of the Advent. All rights reserved. This publication or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations. Printed annually in the fall in Birmingham, Alabama, United States of America.

ART ON THE COVER:

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ETCHING COURTESY OF JILL MARL AR

THE

ADVENT A MAGAZINE OF GO OD NEWS

THE STORY TELLING ISSUE

C O N T E N T

D E P A R T M E N T S COMMON PRAYER

6 Dear Reader

by Matt Schneider

69 Getting Caught Up in the Story

by Zac Hicks

9 Contributing and Featured Creatives

72 Joey Ramone, Easter, and Me

by Gil Kracke

HEART FOR THE ‘HAM

14 Interview with David and Brooke Fleming on Birmingham’s Creative Revival

THE LIST

76 Books Worth Reading Again

by Charlie Ritch

22 Birminghumans: Henry Kilpatrick, Mabry Sansbury

OUR STORY

Q & A

57 Interview with Deborah Diesen, author of The Pout-Pout Fish, on Storytelling

79 About the Cathedral Church of Advent 80 Program Elevator Speeches 88 Ministry Highlights

POETRY

92 Advent Stuff

26 Supernatural Gossip

by Ivy Grimes

94 Retrospect: Ordinary Garden Variety Priest and Preacher

by Charles Clingman

62 The Butterfly

by Debbie Diesen DISPATCH FROM ABROAD

64 Dispatch from Nicaragua

by Lauren Deibert

96 A Good Word

by Andrew Pearson

P H O T O G R A P H F R O M “A C R O S S B I R M I N G H A M ”

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COURTESY OF CHAD MOORE

F E A T U R E S 30 Dinner Guests

by Nick Greenwood

40 Cut Stone

by Jack Sharman

50 Speculations on Identity

by M. Taylor Dawson III

32 Telling Your Own Story

by Sarah Condon

44 Not Quite as I Expected It to Be

by Michael Sansbury

5 2 What Illness Adds to Life and Law School Applications

by Stella Schreiber

36 Defining Grace

by Cameron Cole

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“ THE STORY TELLER” COURTESY OF ERICK FORSY TH

DEAR

READER

Matt Schneider is the Canon for Parish Life and Evangelism at the Advent. He lives in Birmingham with his photographic genius wife,

MATT SCHNEIDER

Hawley, and their two daughters. Although he is from Northern California, Matt shares the Southern passion for telling stories.

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hen I moved to Birmingham about a year ago, one neighborhood that immediately caught my attention was Five Points South. At the heart of this eclectic district where three busy streets converge is the landmark fountain The Storyteller, created by local artist Frank Fleming and captured in the photograph on the facing page by Erick Forsyth.

The central figure of this sculptural fountain is a man with the head of a ram holding up a book and reading to an audience of animals gathered around his feet. Rumor has it the homeless community that congregates in Five Points call the ram-man “Bob.” Because of Bob’s ram head, he has been misinterpreted for years to be some type of satanic figure. But Fleming himself has denied such cultic associations.

TOP RIGHT PHOTOGRAPH: HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

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While I’m not asserting the sculpture is meant to be Christian per se, the plaque on the fountain includes a reference to the prophet Isaiah’s vision of God’s eternal kingdom of peace, assuaging any satanic interpretations.

The plaque also highlights the importance of storytelling: Storytelling is a deeply rooted Southern heritage. The animals are listening to a story intended to convey the idea of a peaceable kingdom.

The theme of this first issue of The Advent is storytelling, which has been broadly interpreted by each contributing writer and artist.

Not only is storytelling a Southern tradition, but the Christian faith and tradition is based upon stories that have been passed down through millennia about how God has been at work through creation, the people of Israel, the Church, and his Son, who typically taught through stories. I’m excited about this first issue of the magazine, which is the product of nearly a year of collaborative labor to explore this theme.

Our cover artist is Jill Marlar, a Birmingham-area printmaker. You can read about her in the Featured Creative section. I met Jill selling her etchings of iconic Birmingham buildings, and I asked if she’d ever created an etching of the Cathedral Church of the Advent. She told me she had not but that several people had coincidentally asked her the same question recently, so I challenged her with creating the etching that is now on our cover. She succeeded, etching a whimsical story of nostalgia about our historic building.

Our featured interview is with Deborah Diesen, a New York Times bestselling children’s book author, who most famously wrote The Pout-Pout Fish. Her book is one of my favorites to read to my daughters, and its message of mercy is comforting in a world full of accusation, even for children. Since Debbie is a professional

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who gets paid to tell stories, I asked her to talk to us about what it is really like to be a published storyteller. This interview should demystify for you the life of an author.

We also have featured essays that wrestle with the concept of storytelling from multiple angles: a testimony of coming to faith; a Southerner’s theological take on storytelling; a very short story about meeting two unexpected dinner guests; a mother’s account of her adult daughter struggling with cystic fibrosis; and more.

We also tell the story of Birmingham, the city we live in and love. The Magic City is going through an era of renewal, largely stimulated by creative economy and culture. We have a heart for the city of Birmingham, and we hope that this magazine can play a role in stimulating its renaissance. But the revitalization of Birmingham isn’t simply an idea about a place. Revitalization is about people, and we seek to tell the stories of those participating in Birmingham’s creative growth.

Finally, I want to add a word of acknowledgment for my dear friend Ethan Richardson, who is the editor of The Mockingbird magazine. If you haven’t read The Mockingbird, I implore you to since it’s in its own echelon among arts, literary, and theology journals. In the earliest stages of developing The Advent, Ethan helped me craft the magazine’s creative vision and introduced me to Tom Martin, our Art Director, who has done a phenomenal job creating not just any magazine but a beautiful piece of artwork.

I hope you will agree that what you are holding is indeed a piece of art and a readable magazine that just so happens to be published by a church—a church that appreciates creativity for its own sake, a church that wants to see Birmingham continue to thrive. Finally, like Bob the ram-man, we are a church with a heart for storytelling—ours is an Old Story about a great Savior who rescues the weary and burdened like you and me, restoring us to his peaceable kingdom. I invite you to gather around and listen.

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C O N T R I B U T I N G

C R E A T I V E S

Students in third- through eighth-grade art classes at the Advent Episcopal School learn about various artists and their techniques, using different materials in creative ways that give students opportunities to express themselves while becoming confident in their ability to create art.

Art history is incorporated into many of the lessons, further exposing the students to different techniques. The images on pp. 36, 38, 39, and 73 are by eighth graders Anna Kulczycka, Catherine Baker, Cole Hall, Dacey Goodwin, Dede Driscoll, Elizabeth DePalma, Emily Ann Smith, Jane Ann Baggett, and Wyatt Trammell. artsonia.com (search “Advent Episcopal School”) Fadi BouKaram was born and raised in Lebanon. He is an engineer by training, a fiscal consultant by profession, and a photographer at heart. He is getting ready to take a sabbatical from his day job to go on a road trip, photographing more than twenty-five cities and towns in the United States named after his home country. The digital photograph on p. 69 was taken in May, the month of the Virgin Mary in Lebanon, celebrated by many by taking vows and walking barefoot from the coast up to the Our Lady of Lebanon Cathedral, a two-hour uphill climb. The woman in the photo isn’t barefoot; she is wearing compression stockings. observecollective.com/fadi-boukaram

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Emily Wilde Coe is the artist behind Wilde Art Co. She was born and raised in Birmingham and grew up in the Cathedral Church of the Advent. She graduated from Auburn University with a degree in architecture and currently works with Williams Blackstock Architects. She also devotes time to drawing portraits as well as honing her calligraphy skills by exploring a wide variety of writing styles. She adores bringing beauty to words on a piece of paper.

When she is not drawing, she loves to spend time with her husband, Matt, and daughter, Adelaide. www.wildeartco.com Erick Forsyth is a native of Mobile who now resides in Birmingham. Before finding his way to metal arts and photography, he spent time as an amateur boxer, classic soul radio host, activist, and traveler, writing and working various odd jobs. “The Storyteller” (p. 6) is a tintype image created in the original photographic process known as “wet plate,” common in the mid to late nineteenth century. Chemicals, in a series of steps, are applied to a surface (in this case, metal) to capture light in striking detail.

The process is fitting for the subject matter of storytelling, as the chemicals respond to light, temperature, and application in ways that mediate, like a storyteller, and produce unique and often unexpected results. erickforsyth.com Jamison Harper studied art in college and has since freelanced as an illustrator and portraitist. He currently spends his days working as a banker and serving his family as a husband and father to his six-year-old son and three-yearold daughter. In addition to making artwork,

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he also enjoys playing baritone saxophone.

He lives in Birmingham. jamisonharper.com Chad Moore is a camera owner living in Birmingham. “Closed on Sundays” on p. 27 is part of a project called Piffle Pics. When he goes to shoot, Chad tries to find a good pairing between an interesting setting and an expressive toy or action figure. That pairing often results in juxtaposition of innocence (fluffy stuffed animal rabbit) and the harsh realities of life (setting of urban decay).

The digital images are printed on metallic paper and matted or infused onto an aluminum sheet.

The crosses on pp. 5, 32, and 33 are a part of his latest project, aCROSS BIRMINGHAM. These crosses have overlooked Birmingham for the past 120 years, once adorning the Cathedral of Saint Paul. The crosses have hit the streets to view firsthand the city that they have watched change over the past century. pifflepics.com and acrossbirmingham.com Eden Schneider is five years old and was born in New Haven, CT. She now lives in Birmingham with her parents and younger sister. She is in kindergarten at the Advent Episcopal School.

Her favorite activity is dancing, and she hopes to become an “Elsa ballerina dance teacher with a blue dress” when she grows up. “Camel” on p. 30 is ballpoint pen on blue construction paper, which she cut out by herself using safety scissors and added glitter by accident. Her favorite movie is Frozen.

Mollie Spardello is a Mississippi girl now living and working in Georgia. She is an artist and educator.

THE ADVENT

F E A T U R E D

C R E A T I V E

JILL MARLAR PRESERVES A GLIMPSE INTO THE PAST

The Advent: Jill, what’s your story?

Jill: I was born and raised in Alabama. My childhood was spent in a small town near Montgomery called Tallassee, and then my teen years were spent in Montgomery. I moved back to Birmingham in 1990 to attend Birmingham Southern College. I’ve lived here since. I received a degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2005 in Early Childhood Education.

I now teach music at Independent Presbyterian Day School. Teaching preschool part time gave me time to start my own small business in 2000 offering afterschool classes for young children, including music, art, and drama. I am able to create art around my teaching schedule, so it works for me. In my mid-30s, after many years of painting, I went back to UAB to study Art Studio, eventually discovering intaglio aquatint etchings, which changed my visual arts focus to printmaking.

TA: What are intaglio aquatint etchings exactly?

J: The name intaglio comes from the Italian word intagliare, which means to engrave, carve, or cut.

Aquatint is a way to achieve tonal value within a plate by biting the zinc or copper in acid after it has been coated with tiny droplets of rosin or lacquer. The longer a certain area of the plate is left uncovered and exposed in the acid, the deeper the “bite” or etch in the plate, which creates a range of tones when the plate is inked and printed on fine paper.

PHOTOGRAPH BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

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TA: Your etchings are very unique. Can you tell us about them?

J: My first show was a series of etchings called The Nostalgia Series inspired by a handful of mid-century photographs purchased at a shop downtown called What’s On 2nd. Many of those etchings are still some of my favorites and most popular. From there I began my Birmingham Landmark Series comprised of eight etchings depicting historical scenes and buildings still in existence or torn down.

"I KNOW EVERY My work tends to reflect a glimpse into the past by preserving the beauty of a building with a moment CITY HAS A in time. A figurative work of a building like TerUNIQUE AND minal Station, which unfortunately met its demise in the late 1960s, can speak to many, offering folks INTERESTING a chance to recall the beauty of its ornate interior H I S T O R Y, B U T or standing on its platforms as a child.

BIRMINGHAM

TA: What intrigues you about Birmingham particularly?

J: I know every city has a unique and interesting FA S C I N AT I N G history, but Birmingham is just fascinating to me.

TO ME." It’s never been a perfect city and has made some regrettable mistakes, but the people that choose to live and or work here tend to believe in its potential. It’s like the Little Engine That Could. I see it constantly with the people working to preserve and save crumbling landmarks, starting small businesses in the city limits, or fighting to keep cultural things going in the heart of it all. That’s what I love about my city. It’s rough around the edges, but there are gems everywhere within—both people and places.

IS JUST

TA: What does your creative process look like?

J: I am teaching hundreds of children three days a week plus raising a 3.5-year-old, so the days of uninterrupted studio time are long gone for a while. It takes planning and motivation during rare moments each week when I can create. My main studio space is in an old building in Tarrant that can accommodate the etch press, acid baths, inking station, etc. The space belongs to another artist who graciously invited me in several years ago to get the print studio up and running. Each year I develop a new series or body of work, usually etchings, but last year it was monotypes.

Throughout the year I do a few commissions and continue to keep up with edition printing and pillow making. Yes, pillow making. Over a year ago, I began making handmade pillows with my original Birmingham landmarks on them and selling them at the weekly Pepper Place Market.

Now they’re at my first large store, West Elm at the Summit. You just never know where things are going to go.

205.602.1256, jmarlar@bham.rr.com facebook.com/jillmarlarintaglioprintmaker etsy.com/shop/JillMarlar

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DAVID AND BROOKE FLEMING ON BIRMINGHAM'S RENEWAL

David and Brooke Fleming are a married couple with a mutual love for Birmingham. David is the CEO of REV Birmingham, a nonprofit focused on revitalization efforts in the city. Brooke is an artist, specifically of handmade sewn arts, and she is one of the conveners of Birmingham Creative Roundtable, a large monthly gathering of creatives. Their son is a student at our day school.

Part of the editorial focus of The Advent magazine is not only to tell the story of our church but also to highlight the city where we are located. The Advent has a heart for the city of Birmingham, and we want to help see it flourish. When thinking about people who could tell the story of where Birmingham has been, where it is now, and where it is going, I immediately thought of David and Brooke.

We had the following conversation at Lucy’s Coffee & Tea (a Birmingham institution since 1993).

Matt: You both do similar yet different things in Birmingham. Can you talk about both REV Birmingham and Birmingham Creative Roundtable?

David: REV Birmingham is a nonprofit organization that was created to be a catalyst for the growth and vibrancy of the downtown area as well as neighborhood commercial cores. We have public and private supporters for that mission.

Birmingham is a creative, vibrant city. Economic and community development means we are focusing on what makes those physical environments vibrant and alive and really accessible for everybody.

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M: Say more about being a catalyst.

D: REV exists to be a catalyst. We try to jump in and do things that otherwise wouldn’t happen naturally and bring about more positive response. We might pull people together or do specific planning work around an area, or we might actually do the physical redevelopment that the market wouldn’t be able to do.

We figure it out from our nonprofit development perspective, and this creates a catalyst. The market responds around what might be the white elephant, the thing that’s holding an area back. We make it an asset and not a liability. That’s catalytic.

M: Can you give me a success story, one that you really like to tell?

D: We were instrumental in redeveloping the spaces underneath all the underpasses downtown that divide the north and south sides of the railroad track that people for so many years complained about being scary and dark. With Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham funding, we were able to turn all four of those spaces into well-lit, artistic lighting areas so that basically we have works of art and lights that have changed the perception of these places.

Now people are drawn to them instead of repelled from them. And it helps to connect the two sides of downtown.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

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M: Brooke, what’s the mission of Birmingham Creative Roundtable? Why did you start it? Are there similarities?

Brooke: I feel like Birmingham is a place of incredible talent and great opportunity. I had a small business in Woodlawn, and I started meeting so many artists and other entrepreneurs that had so much talent and energy. But I realized they could benefit from some better business goals that could actually make money.

That’s what Creative Roundtable is all about, bringing people together, helping them network, introducing really interesting topics, having speakers come in and talk about their interests. I also wanted to create that energy that comes from having everyone together in the room. All of this goes into making the creative industry in Birmingham stronger.

M: Can you give me an example?

B: We’ve had a lot of collaboration take place from just the networking side and having people together in a room and talking about what they do. We’ve also had people come to some of our meetings and then decide to start their own business. There’s one called Sprout & Pour in Homewood. Amanda Blake Turner is a friend of mine, and she took a love of juicing and made it into a business.

“BIRMINGHAM She says that she got inspired to do this from coming to one of our meetings.

IS A CITY M: What inspired her?

B: Well, we had a speaker who was a musician. He was just talking about what he does for a living and how he took what he loves and made it into a business. Amanda was inspired by that and seeing other people who have been able to take their interests and their enthusiasms and put them into a business.

T H AT I S B I G ENOUGH TO M AT T E R I N T H E WORLD BUT SMALL ENOUGH T H AT YO U C A N M A T T E R I N I T. ”

M: Can you give me the basic model of a Creative Roundtable meeting?

B: We always have coffee and pastries there for breakfast. We always meet in the morning. We always have a speaker come in and talk about a specific topic that’s interesting. We’ve talked about branding; we’ve talked about starting small; we’ve talked about taking your dreams to reality. Then we open up to the floor for a group discussion on the topic for about twenty minutes. We end with networking.

M: REV Birmingham has been around for a little while. It’s a pretty robust nonprofit. Creative Roundtable is much smaller. Is there a vision? What’s the five-year plan?

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B: James Kling, who coordinates it with me, and I wanted to get a group together and just start sharing and talking about struggle. We thought it would be ten people in a room. So this has taken us all by surprise that it’s grown. We had our second anniversary in February.

Now we average between fifty to eighty people per month. James and I are looking at what the future needs to be. We have had people approach us about helping us and taking it to the next level. I don’t want it to ever get so big that it doesn’t feel personal. As long as people are benefitting from it, and it’s making some good in the community, then we will keep doing it.

M: I see some overlap between what you two do. Can you talk that through?

Did David inspire you?

B: David inspired me. His life calling is to do what he is doing. He loves the city of Birmingham and honestly cares about its welfare. I’m from Atlanta, but I think it’s rubbed off on me, his interest in the city. I think my individual take on it is that I’m an artist, so I want to help the city too. In my own way that’s what I’m trying to do.

D: People like Brooke are the people we need. The people like me need to be nearby to help because the city’s fabric and its vibrancy are really brought about through people doing artistic things. She’s the one that had more business experience and more creativity. REV is a startup because we’re the result of a merger of a couple of older legacy organizations, one of which goes all the way back to 1957. When we merged them together, it was time to say we really want to reinvent the whole model here for how we are doing and encouraging urban revitalization. So it was time to start again. Brooke has been a good inspiration because she’s able to see things differently without the knowledge of history that I have. Sometimes you need someone who didn’t grow up here to say, “Why don’t you do it this way?”

B: We have a lot of people who come to Creative Roundtable who are new to the city, but we also get a lot of people who are really into Birmingham. They are excited about the changes that are happening here. Sometimes I feel like we’re the front door for the creative side to come and get their bearings. Then 17

there are other organizations, like REV, that we can point them to depending on their needs.

M: So what is it that is so special about Birmingham? I feel it. There’s this sort of creative thing happening. There’s excitement. What’s your perspective on that?

D: I like to steal something from Detroit that one of my colleagues brought back from a trip to Detroit, which I think quite frankly is truer of Birmingham.

That is, Birmingham is a city that is big enough to matter in the world but small enough that you can matter in it. I think that’s one of the magics of the Magic City. It is a city that is big enough to offer a lot, and our history puts us on the world stage because of what’s happened here. But you are a person rooted to make a difference here and not become lost.

M: I love that line from Detroit. Can you think of a particular example where that’s been true?

D: Historically, we are famous on the world stage for Civil Rights. A lot of leadership for that movement came out of this place, and it really got forged here.

In the way that we used to forge iron and steel, we forged a lot of leadership around Civil Rights. The world still looks to Birmingham for leadership on some of those subjects. I think that’s important to point out. But individuals can matter in a place like Woodlawn, where you’ve got people like Mike and Gillian Goodrich, who have decided to help the entire community with their resources. Or an individual like Jeffrey Cain. He was part of the band Remy Zero.

They are most famous for the theme song that was on the TV show Smallville.

They left Birmingham and went to LA, but he came back and decided to put his recording studio, Communicating Vessels, here.

M: Brooke, do you have any thoughts on the idea of Birmingham being big enough to matter to the world yet small enough that an individual matters here.

B: I meet so many artists and small business owners who come in. If you want to do something and make a difference and work hard enough at it, there’s opportunity here for you to be recognized for that. Even when I opened my own shop, I was really shocked that I was in the newspaper for taking a chance and opening a small art gallery on the outskirts of Birmingham. If I had done that somewhere else in a bigger city, no one would have cared.

D: That’s a character trait of Birmingham: If somebody does try to step out there and do something and does it well, people are proud and want to support it.

M: You both mentioned outsiders coming in. I think that’s really fascinating because a lot of places, especially in the South, even smaller towns or a huge place like Atlanta, can be really hard to tap into really quickly. It can take years. Can you talk about the outsider coming in? What’s helpful for launching 18

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an outsider who’s doing something new and creative?

B: I’ve talked to so many people recently who’ve talked about how friendly everyone is and how you can almost get a meeting with anyone in the city if you want to. And they’ll come and take time out of their day and talk to you, get coffee with you. I think there’s some pride in being able to connect.

D: It’s a culture of largely wanting to help each other out. Even if you don’t have an answer or the answer, there’s somebody who does. It’s a city where there are connections to anyone. If I can’t help you out, I probably know somebody who can.

“PEOPLE NEED A SPACE WHERE THEY C A N G O T H AT

M: Can you talk about the importance of RailWILL CONNECT road Park to the city?

D: Railroad Park is a great example of someTHEM WITH thing that has been an incredible catalyst. It was H I S T O R Y. ” an idea that had been on the books for about twenty years before it actually happened, and various people were championing its creation.

They reclaimed a big swathe of industrial land in the middle of the city to create a green space that’s essentially the city’s new common space where everybody can come together. It was done in a way that was true to the history of the city.

The designer was very forward thinking—one of the nation’s best modern public space designers. It’s a real catalyst that led to other things like the ballpark, and now a lot of other things are going on in the middle of downtown. Not only has it been a physical development catalyst, but also if you go there any given day, there’s a very diverse mix of people.

M: What are some potential Railroad Parks of the future?

D: I think what Rotary is doing with the trail in that area sort of takes Railroad Park and makes it more of a linear park extending several blocks to the east.

It’s going to connect to Sloss Furnaces by 1st Avenue South. Alabama Power Company also has great plans to repurpose the old steam plant right there in the middle of downtown. That has the potential to be an incredible catalyst that will make the city something people will be really proud of.

B: And the Lyric Theatre renovation. We had a Creative Roundtable there a while ago. It was totally crumbling and rough. That project is going to be amazing. It’s definitely a gem of the city.

D: One thing I like to say is, “You don’t have to do something that is not true to who you are in order to be catalytic.” The Lyric is a great example of using 19

one of our assets and making it productive again. The Pizitz Building and the Thomas Jefferson Hotel are back underway too. Those things are not new.

They’re just adapting and reusing and repurposing. I think there’s resilience about Birmingham that’s a part of our story. It’s a city from the very beginning that’s had a lot of ups and downs, but because of the resiliency here, Birmingham was never written off.

M: I’m interested in what role the Advent could play in all that’s happening, especially as a large downtown cathedral. Can you think of any possible role that a community of faith or a place especially like the Advent or even our day school could play in revitalization and creative growth?

D: You’re an institution with historical roots that’s an important part of the fabric of Birmingham. While cities always have to be innovative and evolving and forward thinking, there are also certain things that give a city worth that have really never changed throughout history—places where we come together to convene. You’ve been on that corner for over a hundred years, and you’ve valued that place through all the years of people abandoning the city. People need a space where they can go that will connect them with history. A community that doesn’t have any connections to its past is not a very rich place.

The church itself can always be a part of bringing people back to the heart of the city, to the core.

B: Lenten Lunches are one of the top places to go for lunch. The program is amazing.

M: The Lenten preaching series has been happening for over a hundred years.

The lunches have been going on for several decades. What else is out there like that where the church can be a catalyst? Even though it’s huge—most churches don’t open a restaurant for five weeks—there are still forty-seven weeks out of the year when we could be doing similar things, probably not to that scale. Can you think of any holes that need to be filled in the city that maybe a church could participate in?

D: For every church body, it can be something different, but I think one as uniquely situated as the Advent has a real leadership role to play in the help of revitalizing our city.

B: Just getting involved with what is already going on is important. However the church can come alongside creatives is just a great way to reach out.

M: That’s good to hear. One thing that I’ve thought about is I don’t want to see the church competing in the creative marketplace. I’d rather see us join in and see how God is at work in what’s going on versus creating our own endeavors that actually become competition.

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D: You can see that a lot. There’s a tendency for churches, particularly the ones that are larger and have a lot of resources, to sort of carve out their own space and say, we’re doing this, and it is what God is blessing, and we’re not paying attention to what others are doing. There has certainly been a lot of that before. I think listening, paying attention, and understanding what’s going on are the first steps. Sometimes with churches the need becomes so much about sustaining the institution. You could easily get inward focused as opposed to outward focused. You have to almost force yourself out sometimes. I think the vibrancy and the health of the city is a responsibility for all of us. I know we all have our various things that we are doing that may not seem to be connected to this, but it’s really all connected. There’s an interdependency that we all have when we live in the city.

M: I think what you two are doing is great, in your own rights and together.

You’re both so interesting and interested in similar things. That’s really cool.

I see you two as a couple being very important to Birmingham.

D: Thanks. We obviously love it, and we want to be a part of the city always becoming better. I guess God’s given us this place and time to do that.

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BIRMINGHUMANS H E N RY K I L PAT R I C K

AGE

16

OWNER: MAGIC CITY FINDS

I

like the clean lines and the makes and materials they use.

Really just the story behind the designers. It’s really interesting to learn about them and learn about the different companies. What people liked back then and how it’s cycling

back around. It’s exactly what people like today. It’s what you see on all the commercials and TV sets. I find that fascinating. You can walk into somebody’s house, an elderly person, and see the styles that they bought when they were first married. And now it’s come back. When I first got into it, it wasn’t hugely popular, but it’s really grown.

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HEART FOR THE

’ HAM

PHOTOGRAPH BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

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PHOTOGRAPH BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

HEART FOR THE

’ HAM

BIRMINGHUMANS MABRY SANSBURY

AGE

14

BALLET DANCER

I

find beauty in the smell of old leather ballet soles and the flash of satin pointe shoes in a pirouette. I find beauty in the movement of the principal dancers during shows and rehearsals. The winging of a foot in arabesque astounds, the

tulle of a flowing romantic tutu during a variation is more than a little breathtaking. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then the right person must be watching to have it fully appreciated.

I find beauty in the sweat that drips down my back and lets me know that I am working very hard, that something has come of my constant practice. I find beauty in the pink color of canvas flat shoes, the line of a developpe, the quiet creak as you come down from en pointe, and the musicality of a variation.

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P O E T RY

Supernatural Gossip

By Ivy Grimes After I was confirmed by the church, my first act was natural: I gossiped at the reception about possible love I saw between friends who were reaching into a tray of sandwiches, hand against hand against bread.

Meanwhile, I’m the protagonist of the story of the women in my group on Revelation.

I’m lost, they say, until they set me up with the man who leads the study on predestination.

The stories we prefer are hero’s journeys.

We hope we’re on the sacred path, that our wanderings are also missions.

The only other type of story is of the reluctant lover.

I don’t want to forgive.

I don’t want to start every day with the same plain bread.

The stories I write are lists of the supposed sins of those who’ve hurt me.

I’m inventive as the heretics who drew family trees of angels, imagined heaven’s illustrious affairs.

Gossip comes from godsibb, a Norse word meaning siblings in God. There is a seed of love in our desire to know one another’s lives.

In prayer, sometimes I lie and ask for bread, when what I want is to know how the story ends.

Ivy Grimes is a longtime Birminghamian and a new Episcopalian. She’ll happily listen to your latest gossip (and she 26

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promises she won’t tell anyone).

“CLOSED ON SUNDAYS” COURTESY OF CHAD MOORE

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THE STORY TELLING ISSUE 28

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FEATURES

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“ C A M E L” B Y E D E N S C H N E I D E R

DINNER GUESTS By

Nick Greenwood

I

n the spring of 1968, I was a twenty-two-year-old first year law student at Vanderbilt. One of the three women in my class of 136 was named Ruth. She went to law school at the age of forty-eight because her husband had died a year earlier, and she didn’t want to spend all her time interfering in her children’s lives. She had three children: a daughter about two years older than me, a son who was my age, and a younger son who was about fifteen at the time.

At the end of the previous semester I lost the apartment I was renting because the couple I was renting from sold the house. Apartments in college towns are very hard to come by midyear, and Ruth offered me the guesthouse on her property in Franklin. I was reluctant to accept because of the drive, which seemed long at the time. But once I saw it, I was sold, and that is where I lived for the spring semester.

On a Friday night that spring, I was invited to have dinner with Ruth and her oldest son and his wife. Her daughter, who was named Judith or Judy, showed up unannounced with two more guests. One I had heard about because he was the former cartoon editor of Playboy magazine: Shel Silverstein. The other guest was a singer-songwriter I had never heard of, but he had a very easy-to-remember name: Kris Kristofferson.

With the addition of three more guests to what was supposed to be a dinner for four, Ruth was scurrying around in the kitchen, and I kept her company. Shel lumbered into the kitchen in his boots with his beard and bald head and began looking at a drawing on Ruth’s bulletin board that her seven-year old godson gave her. It was a drawing of a horse’s head, and like so many children, her godson had started too far to one side of the page and only got about half of it on the page.

Shel looked at it and said in his gravelly voice, “Hey, man, look at that! I love the way it just … flows off the page!”

It was a memorable evening, and one I have never forgotten. Both Ruth and her son are dead now, but I still keep in touch with the son’s wife and Judith, who brought the two strangers to dinner. Silverstein also wrote the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue,” as well as several children’s books including The Giving Tree.

Nick Greenwood is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt Law School. He practices law in Birmingham where he lives with 31

his wife and his Scottish Terrier.

TELLING YOUR OWN STORY By

Sarah Condon

Y

ears ago I married a man I barely knew and moved from Mississippi to New York City. Don’t worry. It worked out. But I knew I needed a therapist to help me through that first shocking year of marriage and subway maps. So I went, as so many dutiful New Yorkers do, and sat on a couch telling a perfect stranger all my uninteresting secrets.

Finally, after months of this, he looked up at me and compassionately said, “Sarah, in life it is not what happened to us that matters as much as how we tell it.”

P H O T O G R A P H S F R O M “A C R O S S B I R M I N G H A M ”

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COURTESY OF CHAD MOORE

What could it mean that what happens to us isn’t what matters? Isn’t that our story? The ways we have been wronged or treated unjustly?

Most of us have someone to blame for the disappointments our lives have offered. We fault bosses, or mothers, or fathers, or ourselves. Yet what the therapist told me was clear: It is not what has happened in our lives that matters.

It is how we tell our story.

If there is one currency I can understand, it is the art of storytelling. I am a Mississippian by birth. My father is a writer, my mother is a photographer, and my brother is a stand-up comedian. I was raised with storytelling. If there’s one thing you learn in a household like mine, it is that a single story can be told so many different ways. It is all about your vantage point. I realized that this was essentially what my therapist was telling me to find. I needed a way to understand my story, to give meaning to it.

My parents were not the type of people who hid stuff from children. So when we got old enough to hear about the mental illness, suicide, and alcoholism alive and well in our family tree, they simply told us about it. Without edits. And it was never a subject for us to feel ashamed about. It was simply part of our story, and it needed to be told.

I come from the kind of deeply Southern family that owns and recognizes dysfunction as if it’s a spiritual gift. As Dean Faulkner Wells (niece of William) once wrote: Over the generations my family can claim nearly every psychological aberration: narcissism and nymphomania, alcoholism and anorexia, agoraphobia, manic depression, paranoid schizophrenia. There have been thieves, adulter34

ers, sociopaths, killers, racists, liars, and folks suffering from panic attacks and real bad tempers, though to the best of my knowledge we’ve never had a barnburner or a preacher.

Of course, I’ve managed to throw the last one for a loop. I believe we all come from a long line of sinners, saints, and everything in between.

But mostly, I come from a long line of storytellers. It is this storytelling that eventually led me to see my life in light of the Cross.

While I had an understanding of suffering and pain early in life, I had little theological context for it to rest in. I knew that Jesus loved me, but I didn’t know why. I do not begrudge anyone for not filling me in on the details.

Sin is not an easy thing to talk about with an eight-year-old. Honestly, I’m not sure a child that age has the capacity to understand it yet.

But what my therapist said to me that day about the telling mattering more than the happening began to seep past the neurosis that had seemed so important, and his counsel began to take shape in my heart.

It would take living into my own story of hurt and difficulty before I would understand the redemption of the Cross in the midst of my turmoil. I would need to get into fights with my own husband, give birth to my own children, and help to bury my own family members before it would begin to sink in: What happens to us is not what matters most; it is how we tell our story that counts for everything. Thank God that Jesus, in all of his mercy, allows me to tell my story through the account of the Cross.

Jesus acknowledges who we are. All of who we are. And he tells us, You don’t have to be the most compelling part of your narrative. I can be your starting place, your center. To use the

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language of storytelling, Jesus becomes our vantage point.

Now hear me clearly: I’m not here to tell you to accentuate the positive. There is a thread in our culture that loves to use this kind of thinking to encourage us to be more optimistic. I try to stay as far away from that line of thinking as possible because that state of mind is just poorly conducted denial. Whether we like to admit it or not, forced optimism always fails us. Or, at least, it has always failed me.

No, seeing one’s story through the story of the Cross is not about being a happy person.

It is about offering us relief from ourselves.

Jesus doesn’t demand our wit, charm, or intelligence. He does not ask us to list off our life’s experiences or relive our childhoods. In fact, he doesn’t demand anything, really.

When we see our story through the story of the Cross, our hurt and pain are acknowledged in light of the sin of mankind. And our loneliness is informed by the isolation of the crucifixion.

We know that our suffering is redeemed because we worship a God who suffered all the way to death for us. In a nutshell, we don’t have to be the most interesting part of our story. We cannot be. And that is the Good News of the Gospel.

Though my family ended up in the Episcopal Church, both of my parents were raised in the pews of Southern Baptist churches in the Mississippi Delta. And while they had plenty of good reasons for becoming Episcopalians, I will always be grateful that they let my Southern Baptist grandmothers take me to their churches on my summer visits.

I loved the plainness of the worship, the fact that everyone knew who I was, and the beautiful Baptist hymns. On most visits to my grandmothers’ churches I could count on hearing a favorite:

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!

Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!

Heir of salvation, purchase of God, Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.

This is my story, this is my song, Praising my Savior all the day long; This is my story, this is my song.

It is one of those songs that was imprinted on my brain at a very early age: This is my Story, this is my Song. All of our pain and anger have been (and are being) lifted from our hearts.

All of the trespasses I have done (and those that have been done against me) are forgotten and forgiven. My hardship and sin are washed away because Jesus has taken them on himself.

It is not what happens to us in life that makes up who we are. I believe that what my agnostic New York City therapist was saying applies to my life of faith more than it applies to anything else. My vantage point for telling my story is Jesus. What Jesus has done on the Cross connects my story to the story. And that, thanks be to God, is the only part worth telling.

Sarah Condon is mother to Annie and Neil and wife to Josh. She learned more about theology at Ole Miss than she did in seminary.

She serves as priest to St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas and writes for Mockingbird Ministries. She is thrilled to be the keynote speaker for the Advent’s 35

Parish Retreat this fall.

ARTWORK BY ANNA KULCZYCKA , DACEY GOODWIN, E L I Z A B E T H D E PA L M A , E M I LY A N N S M I T H ,

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A N D D E D E D R I S C O L L O F T H E A D V E N T E PI S C O PA L S C H O O L

DEFINING GRACE By

Cameron Cole

O

ne might not expect a central moment in my spiritual life to have come in a cubicle while explicating seventeenth century British poetry.

At the time, I did not understand the magnitude of this moment, but in retrospect, I now understand so much of my Christian life as a child and my motivation for youth ministry today because of one word in a John Donne poem.

I grew up going to church every single Sunday of my life. I had a genuine Christian conversion in the third grade. However, here I was as a junior at Wake Forest University pulling out my dictionary as I stumbled across this word I was unable to define.

The word: grace.

In Donne’s sonnet “Oh my black soul, now thou art summoned,” the

turning point of the poem resides in these central verses: Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack; But who shall give thee that grace to begin?

Even though the theological concept of grace signifies the core of Christianity, I had to pull out my dictionary in order to define it. And for the first time, I saw the meaning of grace: unmerited love.

This moment says so much about the Christian formation of children in the church over the last fifty years.

Studies focused on the efficacy of youth ministry in forming students who continue to attend church after high school indicate that churches have utterly failed. While statistics vary, an

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average of those studies suggests that around sixty-five percent of students who attend a youth group do not return to the Church after high school.

Most research points to the lack of theological substance in youth groups.

In particular, a false understanding of Christianity as nothing more than a moralistic set of behaviors has been considered the major culprit of the Church dropout epidemic. Leading youth ministry expert Dr. Kara Powell of the Fuller Youth Institute has studied youth group alumni who have dropped out of church over the last decade. When asked in a 2014 interview with Christianity Today about the most important factor in promoting sustainable faith in students, Powell remarked, “It’s not easy to distill years of research into one single variable, but if I had to, I’d start with young people’s views of the gospel.”

Powell’s colleague Chap Clark ex38

presses a similar notion in his book Sticky Faith, which he co-authored with Powell. Clark writes, A performance-based Christianity can last only so long.

When kids reach the awareness—through failure or pain, or insecurity or inner wrestling with who is the owner of their faith—that they do not have the power or interest to keep the faith treadmill going, they will put their faith aside.

Research has shown that various factors positively influence the sustainable faith of young people. Partnering with families, cultivating a rich, biblical belief system, and integrating students into the Church all promote long-term retention.

However, no factor has greater import than students’ understanding

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that Christianity first and foremost is about what a God of grace has done for them in Christ. When children own that Jesus has died for their sins, they will run to God when they have a grave moral failure. When they burn out from striving too hard, they will remember that Jesus’ yoke is easy and his burden is light. When they encounter tragedy, they will remember that the Cross above all reassures them of the goodness of God amidst painful circumstances.

With our ministry to youth at the Advent, we maintain tight focus on our ultimate mission: forming students who stick with Christ and the Church after high school and who live lives of redemption for the kingdom.

All that we do points to this bottom line. If nothing else, when students leave the Advent for college around the age of eighteen or nineteen, we want them to walk away knowing the

amazing grace of Christ.

I have observed a life-changing progression in my life from that fateful day in a library cubicle at Wake Forest. Grace moved from words in a dictionary to the core hope of my heart. God’s grace has provided me with freedom, healing, relief, strength, and joy. May the words of God’s grace travel from our children’s heads into their hearts and make them come alive in Christ.

Cameron Cole has served as Director of Youth Ministries at the Cathedral Church of the Advent since 2005. He serves as the chairman of Rooted: Advancing Grace-Driven Student Ministry. Cameron is the editor of Gospel-Centered Youth Ministry: A Practical Guide and has been published in the blogs for The Gospel Coalition, Mockingbird, Modern 39

Reformation, and Youth Specialties.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

CUT STONE By

Jack Sharman

O

ne summer day when I was a little boy, my grandmother took me down to the state archives building. Outside, the heat was deep and oppressive; inside, the chilled air was a delight. Under the high ceiling, the air conditioning flowed along the white marble that sheathed the walls.

Into one such interior wall were cut the names of local residents who had died in the service of the Confederacy. My grandmother took my hand and guided my index finger over the names of my ancestors, as though my five-year-old finger were cutting the marble anew. As my flesh touched it, I thought I heard the cold stone hiss and sigh.

We left, and I have never been back.

A half-century later, this scenario will doubtless strike some as odd, but my grandmother had lit upon how to best tell a story—which, by the way, is the same manner in which Scripture tells its story. I had been asking her questions about provenance, history, and family. Questions about battles and death and— although I would not have put it so—my ultimate place in the narrative. She knew that, in order for me to understand, to “learn and inwardly digest,” she would have to put me into the narrative itself. Words would have to become stone and time and names.

The Bible puts God into the narrative itself. God is Logos. God is Word (John 1:1-5). The Word kept its “wordness” so to speak, but also became flesh, a blood-and-sinew narrative in history (John 1:14). Thereafter, the Word was in the Cross (1 Corinthians 1:18).

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Finally, at Easter the narrative is complete­—not on paper, so to speak, but in the reality of a dead God-Man resurrected, taking steps out of the stone tomb.

If the empty tomb is a mystery to the world, that is at least part of the narrative point. As novelist Flannery O’Connor noted: Faith is a “walking in darkness” and not a theological solution to mystery. The poet is traditionally a blind man, but the Christian poet, and storyteller as well, is like the blind man whom Christ touched, who looked then and saw men as if they were trees, but walking. This is the beginning of vision, and it is an invitation to deeper and stranger visions Of course, in our sin we often want to solve the mystery ourselves. We want to tell a story the way we would like ourselves to appear, much as an adolescent uses the social media platform du jour to make himself look and sound more attractive, popular, and put together than is the case.

As I write, Dr. Robert H. Schuller, televangelist and founder of the Crystal Cathedral, has died. His business empire is in disarray, his soaring cartoonish building sold, ironically, to a Roman Catholic diocese. An obituary noted that he was: an apostle of positive thinking and a symbol of success. A charismatic shepherd, he was one of television’s first preachers to reach audiences around the world with a hopeful message of self-healing and self-empowerment. (One of his books is titled Turning Hurts Into Halos.) His ministry represented a new wave in mainstream American Protestantism, one that held out hope not just for achieving personal salvation, its traditional concern, but also for solving personal problems. Dr. Schuller proclaimed a “theology of self-esteem” and a belief in the power of “possibility thinking.”

Schuller’s error was not his cruise-ship approach to church services but rather his attempt to build a lasting narrative on self rather than on the person

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of Jesus. Storytelling looks to the other, and says something concrete about the other. For Christians, the other is the Creator. The other is God, manifest, incarnate and mysterious.

Recently, I went to a cemetery not far from that state archives building my grandmother and I had visited. She is buried in a family plot enclosed by a rusting, shaky iron fence. My grandfather is also there, a World War I veteran and sometime-farmer, sometime-railroad man. The cemetery is quite old: many birthdates in the stones are eighteenth century dates. The old tombs are elaborate, with cherubs, plinths and pedestals. There are rosewreaths sculpted into stone; kneeling blind angels with massive lopsided wings; children’s graves no larger than a golf bag, their child-voiced names obliterated by centuries of weather, the stone blind and smooth.

Graves in the newer section of this cemetery are not nearly as vivid. This is in part due no doubt to our ancestors’ greater intimacy with death, but it is also due to their recognition that the narrative is not in the obituary but rather in the reality of history, just as the gospel narrative lies not in Schuller’s exposition of self but rather in the reality of God’s name, identity, and resurrection.

An odd winter thunderstorm had passed through the cemetery. Dirt was splattered on cherubs’ bare feet; the flowers in a granite vase were crooked. As I drove out of the cemetery, I thought for a moment about going over to the state archives building, to see if a middle-aged man’s fingers still fit in the letters of dead men’s names. I pointed my car towards the interstate and drove, but I lifted up a prayer, secure in the only narrative that matters: the risen Lord’s.

“SHE WOULD HAVE TO PUT ME INTO THE NARRATIVE I T S E L F.”

Jack Sharman is a lawyer in Birmingham and a member of the Cathedral Church of the Advent.

He is a regular contributor to the Advent’s Bible blog and has served on the vestry. He also writes at jacksharman.com about white-collar crime, theology, crime fiction, and cocktails, all of which involve a strong narrative.

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“MEANDERING” COURTESY OF JAMISON HARPER

NOT QUITE AS I EXPECTED IT TO BE By

Michael Sansbury

I

couldn’t see Cameron Shoemaker rolling his eyes, but I could feel it.

Tom Ward, Sewanee’s beloved chaplain, was convening another year of Catechumenate—a sort-of confirmation class on steroids—and he had asked me to share my story. But my story did not impress Cameron, or more accurately, he wasn’t buying it.

Cameron and I were in the same fraternity, brothers under the bylaws, but we weren’t really friends. Still, we were often in close proximity, especially on weekend nights. So Cameron regularly observed me drinking and smoking and cursing, usually in excess, but he rarely observed the Holy Spirit working through me. As I stood before a crowded room that Wednesday night, telling them about my conversion the year before, Cameron was having a hard time squaring Maundy Michael with Saturday Sansbury.

I didn’t fault him in the least.

CONVERSION WAS T HE FART HEST T HING from my mind when

I went to my first Catechumenate meeting the year before. My interests were more immediate: I had met a girl. Not just any girl. The girl I was going to (and sometime later did) marry. We had started and maintained a long-distance relationship largely on the strength of her charm, wit, and intelligence. Yet she was a Christian.

Growing up in Georgia, I had known many Christians. I had even gone to church, typically on Christmas and Easter, but also somewhat regularly when I was younger. I’d been confirmed as a matter of course when I was thirteen,

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but after that, I’d grown increasingly skeptical because Christianity seemed to be providing the wrong answers to the wrong questions.

The final break for me came in August of 1993 when under the guise of “family values” and “community standards” a group of Cobb County Christians acted in a decidedly ungraceful manner. They appeared on the front page of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, triumphantly cackling with buttons reading “We support community standards.” I cut out the picture and tacked it up on my bulletin board.

If that was the body of Christ, then I really wasn’t interested.

It was just as well though since Jesus didn’t really seem that interested in me. Many of my Christian friends said quite openly that Jesus spoke to them, but, while I’d been open to that opportunity, I’d never had the pleasure. An omniscient and omnipotent God couldn’t find a few minutes to say “hello”? I knew when I wasn’t wanted.

While I knew a few Christians in high school and college that I deemed to be intelligent, I figured they either had lower standards of evidence than I did or just hadn’t thought it through. But then I met Tamara.

TA M A R A H A D C L E A R LY T H O U G H T I T through, as I discovered

during our lengthy conversations over email, telephone, and the occasional dinner. She was unapologetically Christian, but while she was from Cobb County, her community standards included kindness and compassion. I was infatuated with her, and I knew I needed to take her seriously.

So I became a catechumen, though I did not intend to become a Christian.

I just wanted to get a better understanding of what Christianity was all about.

Catechumenate seemed like a perfect place. It would begin with a lecture and then break into seminar groups where we would examine biblical passages.

Yes, I said “lecture” not “sermon.” “Seminar” not “Bible study.” We were college students and professors, after all—intellectuals and scholars—not Bible-beating rednecks.

But a curious thing started to happen. As we began to read the Gospel of John, I began to realize that all was not quite as I expected it to be.

John’s Gospel wasn’t a list of rules. It wasn’t a harangue against immorality. It wasn’t a collection of fairy tales and fables. It was a collection of stories about a singularly remarkable man who wasn’t quite what anyone expected him to be.

A man who was quick-witted yet compassionate; a man who could puncture pretension with a well-aimed question; a man who said remarkable things that, at first glance, didn’t quite make sense.

Most importantly, it was about a man who said that God wasn’t quite what we expected God to be, that God was sometimes hidden and sometimes quiet,

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working even when we thought God was gone. He said that God was not the morality police or the enforcer of community standards but like a man who, when his selfish and dirty son was still far off, would go out to meet him where he was and bring him back for a party.

He was a singularly remarkable man, sure. But was he God? Was there a God? I couldn’t say. I could only say that I finally understood why people took the Bible so seriously, why they deemed it worthy of study, why it might seem worthwhile to go to church.

S EWA NE E ’S A LL SA I N T S’ CHAPEL IS a beautiful building in the

center of campus. Tom Ward was fond of saying that because of its location you have to deal with the chapel one way or the other. I’d attended many services there, enjoying the music and the atmosphere. But before Catechumenate the music and the atmosphere seemed almost glommed onto Christianity, as if the artists and the architects pretended to believe in Jesus in exchange for funding. But now the words of the prayer book began to make sense and the music seemed inspired, not to please an angry God, but in gratitude to … to something. I still wasn’t quite sure what.

Then it happened. But before I get into what happened, let me say this: I had been given plenty of opportunities to choose God. I had been raised in a Methodist church. I had gone to confirmation classes. I was attending an Episcopal college. I had friends who were Christians. I was in (OK, I’ll admit it) a Bible study, and I was regularly attending church. I was given every opportunity to choose Christianity, but I didn’t. I still didn’t believe. If I was going to become a Christian, it wasn’t going to be through my faith alone. God was going to have to reveal himself to me.

Mind you, I didn’t believe God actually revealed himself to people. My friends who claimed otherwise I deemed delusional or, more kindly, wishful thinkers.

I was still a long way off.

“ J O H N ’S G O S P E L WASN’ T A LIST OF RULES. IT WASN’ T A HAR ANGUE AGAINST I M M O R A L I T Y.”

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But then in February of 1997 something happened. At 3:45 am I was sleeping the peaceful sleep of the delusional when I was awakened. Something was crushing me. Suddenly, the weight of my conscience, of my wastefulness, of my worthlessness was being pushed down onto me. I was a lonely, selfish person, my accuser said, who was incapable of loving or being loved.

I swear it was God. Tearful and erratic, I got out of bed and wrote an email to the only person I thought could help me: Tamara. I explained to her what had happened and what I felt like I needed to do.

J E R RY M AG U I R E WAS R E L E AS E D I N 1996. That movie begins

with sports agent Jerry Maguire, played by Tom Cruise, waking in his bed overwhelmed by his phoniness and writing a mission statement for his sports agency where he argues for “fewer clients and less money.” That mission statement results in him being fired and his life being destroyed. Later, Jerry laments that he “ate two slices of bad pizza, went to bed, and grew a conscience.”

Jerry’s lament comes from a very real place. Often the demons that assail us in the night are chased away by the morning sun, and what seemed profound in the dark—or worrisome or difficult—seems silly in the light.

But sometimes it destroys us.

W HE N TA MA R A WOKE UP, SH E called me. I felt poured out, like I’d

just buried my best friend or a dear pet. I didn’t feel silly at all.

That afternoon I knelt down in St. Augustine’s Chapel just off Sewanee’s All Saints’ Chapel, and I told God, “If you want me, you’ve got me.” I opened my eyes and looked to my right, my eyes fixing on a plaque commemorating an Anglican bishop.

As my vision cleared, I made out the name. Cyril Kenneth Sansbury. The Lord works in hilarious ways.

It was time for me to meet Tom Ward.

TO M WA R D WAS EVE RY T H I NG I aspired to be but was incapable of

being. He was tall with a commanding presence and a booming voice; I was a bit shorter. He was a star basketball player at Sewanee; my athletic career at Sewanee was somewhat less illustrious. His athletic and academic prowess earned him a Rhodes Scholarship; I wasn’t even asked to apply.

I had, of course, seen Tom Ward in a group setting in Catechumenate and in the pulpit, but I was afraid to walk into his office, especially on a matter of religion, especially when it was about this late night conversion, which, now

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that I thought about it, seemed a little bit silly. But there I was. As I hesitantly unspooled my story, he didn’t snicker or raise an eyebrow. Instead, he leaned forward and told me, in about two minutes, two of the most important things I’ve ever been told by anyone.

First, he said, "You are going to doubt this experience one day. Don’t."

Second, he opened his Bible to 1 Samuel 3 and read me a story. Samuel lived in a time when there weren’t many visions from the Lord. One night, the Lord called out to him three times, but each time Samuel mistook the voice for someone else. But the Lord didn’t give up. On the Lord’s fourth try Samuel finally heard and responded.

He closed his Bible. “Sometimes,” he said, “we mistake the voice of God for the voice of other people.”

I knew exactly what he meant.

I WOULD LIKE TO SAY that I emerged from Tom Ward’s office a changed

man. In some ways I guess I was. But those changes were inside me, many of them yet to unfold.

What didn’t change was the part of me that was visible to Cameron Shoemaker.

I still drank. I still smoked. I still … did other things. My most important sins were still in front of me. But I was different. As silly as it sometimes seems, the author of the universe came into my dorm room, sat on my chest, and made me cry “Abba.” It wasn’t because I deserved it, and it wasn’t because I wanted it. It was because he—for reasons of his own—wanted me.

Why he wanted me I will never know. Some days I even do what Tom Ward told me not to: I doubt. But as I look back almost twenty years later, I can begin to see how those days led to this one and how what God did to me then has made me who I am now.

And I bet Cameron Shoemaker can do the same. Despite my questionable witness, he stuck around and finished Catechumenate. Sadly, the effects weren’t immediate, and after graduating from Sewanee, he headed to Wall Street.

Then just last year he became an Episcopal seminarian.

Michael Sansbury is a lawyer, writer, and beekeeper in Birmingham. He is a member of the Advent, where he has played Pontius Pilate, taught Sunday school, and served in the Advent Softball Ministry. In a clear act of unwarranted grace, he was elected to the vestry of the Advent in 2014.

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PENCIL AND WATERCOLOR SKETCHES BASED ON P A B L O P I C A S S O ’ S P O R T R A I T O F I G O R S T R A V I N S K Y,

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COURTESY OF M. TAYLOR DAWSON III

S P E C U L AT I O N S O N I D E N T I T Y A N D S T R AV I N S K Y ’S WA R D R O B E By

M. Taylor Dawson III

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well-meaning haberdasher once proclaimed to me that one’s clothing makes the first and most important impression on others. I took this to mean that a person’s wardrobe is an integral part of constructing one’s identity—who we are.

I was taken aback by this statement, perhaps even a little insulted. Did he really mean my wardrobe is more important than my education, my career, my social status, my religious beliefs, and my family when it comes to revealing to others who I really am? If so, does the other stuff even matter? If not, does any of it matter anyway? I must be having an identity crisis.

Who am I? Several months later I decided to learn how to draw again. I dug through my library and found Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

by Betty Edwards. One of the exercises in the book focuses on redrawing Pablo Picasso’s famous portrait of Igor Stravinsky. While I was working on the exercise, I thought about Stravinsky’s suit and the conversation I’d had with the haberdasher.

I wondered if my perceptions of the person in this drawing would change were the suit rendered more specifically. Would the clothes change my opinions of Stravinsky? To test this theory, I created a large body of work based on Picasso’s Portrait of Igor Stravinsky, speculating on the man’s wardrobe.

My perceptions of Stravinsky didn’t change with his wardrobe. I then thought that if Stravinsky’s clothing did not determine his identity for me, then perhaps his music would. After all, he was a very important composer. So I listened to a lot of his music, and I suffered. But

I then figured that if his identity were based on either his wardrobe or his music, some people would favor his identity while others would not.

Perhaps one’s identity cannot be universally defined. If it could be, I reckon our identity would be a clever fabrication—a façade or projection, veiling the truth.

If Stravinsky’s identity shouldn’t be determined by his wardrobe or his music, then what should it be based on? More importantly, what should my identity be based on? After all, I’m the one having the crisis!

To find out who we really are, we must drill down to the core of our souls to find the truth.

The scary thing about this exercise is that the real truth about oneself—our true identity— can be horrifying, suffocating, and seemingly impossible to deal with. Few of us are alone in this realization. As dark as this may seem, there is Good News—a key that unlocks the chains of our oppressive pretense, liberating us from ourselves, allowing us a way to ultimately cope with the knowledge of who we are.

When I dig deep to discover my true identity, I find that it is not based on my wardrobe, my education, my career, or my family. I find that in truth I am a sinner who has fallen short of the glory of God, but I have heard the Gospel. I was given the gift of faith, and by the grace of God I am clothed in Christ’s love and righteousness.

This is my identity. These are my clothes.

I simply misunderstood what wardrobe the well-meaning haberdasher was referring to.

Taylor Dawson is a sinner who lives in Birmingham.

Simultaneously, he is a husband, a father, an architect, a painter, an angler, a cyclist, and whatever he dreams up next.

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He also is a member of questionable standing at the Advent.

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W H AT I L L N E S S ADDS TO LIFE AND L AW SCHOOL A P P L I C AT I O N S By

Stella Schreiber

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his past summer my daughter Emily began to work on a personal statement that would become a part of her graduate school application. She was entering her senior year of college and was planning to apply to law school, and she wanted to have plenty of time to write something well that would express what shapes and motivates her.

She worked on the statement for several months and then asked several family members to help her proofread and edit it. Shortly thereafter, she approached a couple of her professors about writing recommendations. They of course generously agreed to spend the time to do so, but one asked to read her personal statement. Emily was reluctant to share it with her because she felt that she had poured a lot of herself into it and had spent a great deal of time editing it already. Also the statement was very personal, and she wasn’t completely comfortable sharing it with her professor. However, at the professor’s insistence, she complied.

The personal statement began with a funny anecdote followed by a description of how the incident had led her to more vigorously research and defend her positions so that she could really contribute in the areas where she is most passionate. At the end she mentioned that while we are all mortal, because she

PHOTOGRAPH BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

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“G OD A LW A Y S THINKS WE ARE WORTH THE TIME AND E F F O R T.”

has cystic fibrosis, she is reminded each day that her life span is predicted to be shorter than the average. This knowledge energizes her to more passionately pursue things she would like to accomplish each day. She appreciates and makes the most of whatever time—short or long—she has.

A few days later she received an email response from her professor. The professor critiqued a few of Emily’s thoughts but then concluded with “my concern is that law schools may not want to educate someone who has a short life expectancy—too much effort and expense.”

E MI LY WAS O F CO U RSE VERY upset.

No one had ever told her that she might not be able to pursue her dreams or make a difference— much less that she might not be worth educating.

To suggest that the prediction of a shortened life span, which of course we all know no one can truly predict, would disqualify her from any pursuit or cause others to discount her was wounding.

She forwarded the email to her father, Allen, to me, and to her two brothers for our input. I know that we are all sometimes blinded by our love for each other and that while the boys can poke fun at Emily without mercy, if anyone else messes with her, they are the first to come to her defense.

But we were all outraged.

Our older son, an engineer, strongly dislikes writing. He even frequently misspelled engineering well into earning his degree. But he wrote a very eloquent letter to the Dean of Students outlining all the reasons why no one should THINK—much less actually say to someone—what this professor wrote. It was even worse coming from an educator in a position to advise and encourage students. He forwarded the letter to Emily, asking her permission to send it.

They never did send it.

Our other son cited numerous individuals who had gone on to do great things when others thought they would not live to an old age. He advised Emily to

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toss out the old essay and write a new one, which began “My advisor thinks law schools would reject me because of my differences. But CF has altered my life perspective . . .” As a plus, she could send a copy of the essay to her advisor a few years from now when she was completing law school, just to let her know how wrong she had been.

Of course Allen and I were crushed. Even though we know it is totally unrealistic, we want to protect our children from all hurt and sadness. The thought that anyone would suggest to someone that she isn’t worth the time and effort kept gnawing at me.

Then a few weeks later as I was sitting in a Bible study, I was reminded that God always thinks we are worth the time and effort—no matter how many mistakes we make or how old, infirm, lost, or broken we are, or how short or long our time on earth may be. At that point I was finally able to let the resentment go.

I was reminded that it doesn’t matter at all what this professor said or thought or what label she thought was valid. The only truth that matters is that God always thinks we are worth the time, effort, and expense.

E MI LY COMPI LE D A LI T T LE M O L ESK IN book of some of ≠≠her

favorite Bible verses as a Christmas present for me a couple of years back, so I went home and read through it. Several verses about forgiveness struck a chord, but these two in particular provided a lot of comfort: God rescued me from the grave and now my life is filled with light. (Job 33:28, NLT) For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:17–18, NIV).

Stella Schreiber grew up in Virginia Beach, VA. After raising their children, Scott, William, and Emily, she and her husband Allen are adjusting to quieter time with their fourteen-year-old golden retriever. She has worked for the Advent for two years coordinating visits to members who may not be able to attend church as often as they would like to.

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D E B B I E D I E S E N O N S TO RY T E L L I N G

recording of a Sunday adult education class I taught on her book at the Advent.

We sparked a friendship over email, so when I was developing the theme of storytelling for this first issue of The Advent, I asked if she, a popular children’s storyteller, would be willing to talk about the subject. Despite humbly claiming to be no expert on the topic, she graciously agreed to talk shop.

Matt: Who is Debbie Diesen? What’s your story?

Debbie: I’m an author and mother of two wonderful kids who inspire many of my stories.

They are sixteen and thirteen. In addition to being a writer, I am by training a librarian. I also have been working for a number of years at a small nonprofit, doing their bookkeeping.

So I’m a word person but a numbers person too. I enjoy both. Before working as a reference librarian, I was a bookseller. I worked at a bookstore for a long time, and I just keep meandering around. I’m not very good at telling my own story.

About a year ago I wrote an article listing some of my favorite children’s picture books that I thought showed themes of mercy. The first book I mentioned, my favorite on the list, was The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Diesen. It’s the story of sad Mr. Fish, whose disposition is turned around for the good when a silver fish comes from out of nowhere to give him a kiss. Debbie Diesen later caught wind of my article and tweeted it. I in turn heard about her tweet, so I reached out to her, also sending her an audio PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF DEBORAH DIESEN

M: At the bookstore and the library, did you have your hands on children’s books?

D: I didn’t work in the children’s area when I worked at the bookstore, so it didn’t influence me much. As a librarian, I was a reference librarian, so again, no interaction with kids. It wasn’t until my own kids were born and I was immersed in children’s books that it kind of retriggered my interest in writing.

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MATT SCHNEIDER

CHILDREN’S BOOK AUTHOR

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M: So this immersion ignited the creativity by just handling the books?

D: I’ve always enjoyed writing. When I was young, I was very enthusiastic about it. I hadn’t tripped up against any barriers or rejections. I think as a third grader my creativity was at its highest because I hadn’t had any of the things that happen when you put stuff out there. You’re inevitably going to get rejected, or somebody’s going to say, oh, that’s terrible. In a way I have always enjoyed writing but have become more timid about it over the years just as life unfolds.

Maybe it was a reconnection to the books of my childhood that helped retrigger my interest and made me think I can do this.

fourth grade (see p. 63). I typed it up on our family typewriter, and I showed it to my mom.

Not surprisingly, because my parents are very encouraging, she told me it was a very good poem. Then she said I should put a date on it because real writers always date their work. She did not realize it at the time—I told her many years later—but that was to me my initiation as a real writer. In all the years since, whenever I feel like I’m not a real writer I remember to put a date on my work. When I talk to kids in school, and especially when I talk to teachers, I remind them of how important it is to listen for encouraging voices and to be an encouraging voice.

M: Are there any rejections from an early age that stand out to you that maybe kept you from your third-grade freedom?

D: A lot of it may have been self-rejection— assuming that what I was writing wasn’t good enough, that it wouldn’t find a home, that I shouldn’t bother, and that I should do other things. Sometimes when you’re feeling vulnerable, you anticipate the worst outcome and prepare yourself for it. You can get in your own way creatively. I see that amongst my fellow creatives. It’s important to have a community when you’re creative. If you don’t have a community, you start giving too much credence to the voice in your head that says you’re not good enough. You need some people around you to remind you that the act of creating in itself is important and, by the way, you are good enough. Maybe getting in my own way early on tripped me up. Happily, I have a strong writing group now.

M: One thing I noticed in The Barefooted, Bad-Tempered Baby Brigade is your dedication: “For my parents, Ron and Wilma Diesen, who always clap and cheer.” Is that related to what you just told me?

D: Yes, they have always been in my corner, have always encouraged me. As a kid, I always just assumed that’s the way everybody has it.

Over the years I’ve learned that’s not the case.

It was a gift, a profound gift that continues to reverberate throughout my life. Happily they are both still a part of my life, and both still active and healthy.

M: Was there anything that did help to liberate you? Was it the writing group? Or was there something else that gave you confidence?

D: I have a very distinct memory of the first poem I ever wrote when I was in the third or 58

M: Who is the inspiration for Miss Shimmer in The Pout-Pout Fish? Do your parents have an imprint on this character? She seems to be a sort of embodiment of love.

D: I never really thought about her being inspired by anyone in particular. I’m not sure she is. The silver fish that came along and kissed Mr. Fish was supposed to be a pure random act of kindness. Part of the inspiration for her is what I see as all the cases of random acts of kindness that have helped me. I know how powerful those can be. When you tell a story, at its most basic essence, you’re saying some-

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thing happened, and I want to tell you about it.

Then you as a storyteller can choose how you want to tell it—whether you’re going to tell it with words, or music, or dance—and you also choose how much control, how much of the story are you going to tell, and how much are you going to leave up to the person hearing it.

You can be on the very controlling end of the spectrum, telling your reader or listener what they are supposed to think. Or you can be a little more indirect and leave more of it up to the recipient. There’s no right way to do it. Every story is different. Every teller is different. Every hearer is different.

ing group has “WE ALL a manuscript she wrote, and LIKE TO TELL it is so good STORIES, AND that when I read it my WE ALL LIKE TO first reaction HEAR STORIES. was, I wish I had written SO BY SHARING this. That’s the STORIES, IT IS type of jealousy I’m talking A CONNECTIVE about, where I PROCESS think this is so good I wish I T H AT B U I L D S could write C O M M U N I T Y. ” something like this. This is so marvelous, but it wasn’t a jealousy in a negative sense. It was just pure appreciation for this marvelous manuscript. Not only is it a great manuscript, but also it’s a story of something that I’ve never seen before, written in a way I’ve never seen.

It was her telling the story in a way only she could tell it.

M: Who inspires you if anyone? What author or storyteller?

D: I find inspiration in terms of writing in almost everything I read. What I’ve learned about writing is not that there’s one best way to write or one best story to tell. I’ve heard a lot of writers say that everyone has a story that only they can tell. Sometimes when you read something, you think, this is that person’s story, and they’ve told it in a way that only they could tell it. It just resonates when you’re reading it, and that inspires me. Sometimes you read these things, and you almost feel jealous of how profoundly well done it is. But then you step back and say, wow, what I’m witnessing is marvelous.

So I find lots of inspiration in anything that’s well written. I find plenty of inspiration in my writing group. We meet once a month, and they inspire me with their work. I don’t have particular people I would point to, but there’s lots of inspiration all around me.

M: That’s so fascinating: Here you are a New York Times bestselling author, and you still have that reaction. It’s so frustrating that we can have all these accomplishments, yet there’s still lack of satisfaction.

D: I may have mischaracterized it a little bit because there are two kinds of jealousy. There’s the insecure jealousy, which I think we’re all prone to occasionally. You just think, oh, that other person’s work is great, and I’m awful.

That’s more of a self-absorption that comes from insecurity, and I think most creative people battle insecurity throughout their lives. You can’t help it. Insecurity goes with anything you do that involves risk. The more you listen to it, the more it gets in your way of doing your

M: What’s an example of something that made you jealous?

D: There is always that interesting reaction to things that seems like a little pang of jealousy but you know better. Then you move on to appreciation. One of the people in my writ59

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best work. You just have to keep coming back to it and say, you know what, let that go. That’s human frailty. But the other kind of jealousy is almost more of a celebration, where you see something and say, that’s so fantastic. You just have this feeling of, oh, wow, I wish I had done it, but you feel it in a celebratory way.

M: Do you have any regrets with your storytelling so far, especially with publishing?

D: It can be frustrating sometimes when you take your creative self to market eventually— the process of getting published. Every creative field has this. There’s a difference between the pure act of writing and the process of trying to find a publishing home for the material. To try to get things published is a different part of the writing process than the actual writing. It’s a lot more frustrating for people, and that may be where a lot of the insecurity can come home to roost. They have a piece of writing that they feel very proud of, and they think it’s good, or maybe they even know it’s good, but then they send it out, and they send it out, and they send it out, and it’s rejection after rejection. That can take the air out of people’s sails and cause them to turn their back on being creative. I’ve been in the field long enough to have seen people try and not have success on the publishing end of things, so they give up on writing. You have to be able to keep at least a little bit of buffer between your life as a writer and your life as a published author. Even now I have plenty of rejections. I have stories that my heart is greatly connected to that I keep trying to find a publishing home for that probably will never find a home. I have to remind myself that those stories were worth writing too, at least for whatever role they played in my life, but they might not ever be published books. That’s not a regret, but it’s a reality of trying to be a published writer.

M: Is there an example of something that 60

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you’ve bumped into that surprised you a lot?

D: I’ll pop onto sites like Amazon and just take a look and see if somebody’s posted a review.

Sometimes people post reviews that are not very positive. That’s OK because some people will like a book, and some people won’t. I have no problem with people not liking my books. I don’t have my ego invested in what I write. Yet it can be a little discouraging to log on and read a one-star review. I’ve learned—most authors I think learn—not to read your reviews. It’s too painful, but it’s tempting to look. I’ve been surprised by the impact that something like that can have at least momentarily. On the other end of the spectrum, there are extraordinary connections that have happened that I couldn’t have dreamed up. I’ve met people on the other side of the world through my books. I’ve made friends I wouldn’t have ever met if it weren’t for the telling of the story and the publishing of the story. Absolutely no regrets, but lots of surprises, mostly all good.

M: What do you think the essence of storytelling is that allows people to connect across borders or when we surround ourselves around a story?

D: We all like to tell stories, and we all like to hear stories. So by sharing stories, it is a connective process that builds community. As a reference librarian or a bookkeeper, I have to take a lot of information and then make it understandable and digestible to somebody else. In the arts, it’s a story about how people feel or how people experience something. It’s distillation. Storytelling is in more realms than we notice, but it’s such a human need. Community is also a human need, so what we think of more traditionally as storytelling taps into both of those needs.

M: What do you think are some big ideas that you’re distilling in your stories?

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D: I tend to come back to two things. One is a kindness and connection theme. Another theme that I see in my own writing is individuality, celebrating self and taking joy in that. I like to play with those ideas. There also seems to be, especially in my rhyming stories, a lot of yelling. I have an unpublished story about a panda who gets mad at all his friends because they keep bringing him gifts of food, and he only eats bamboo. So he’s shouting at them, but by the end he realizes what they’re doing is an act of kindness. Even though it’s not his preferred food, he invites them in for a potluck.

When something is right, when you’ve written it just right, you can feel it inside.

M: I wonder how one can find that place of confidence or the thing that they have to say that resonates.

D: If I had the answer to that, I’d probably have a bestselling self-help book. There’s no simple answer. We all find it sometimes, no matter your creative realm, and then we lose it again.

Then we find it. Then we lose it again. You just keep coming back. You try the things that work.

You look around. You observe people who seem to be succeeding at it and watch them and try to emulate them. And all those things that are good for us generally speaking—taking care of yourself, connecting to others, getting outside, sitting in the sunshine, taking walks, listening to the birds—feed your creative self as well.

They help you get to that place where you can hear with more clarity your own thoughts and unique voice. Then you’ll lose it again, and it’ll come back. It’s just an ongoing process.

M: What is one piece of advice you’d give aspiring storytellers or creatives?

D: The best storytelling comes from a place of confidence and belief. You don’t want to write something and be overconfident and never be open to any feedback, but I think a lot of storytellers and writers and creative types get in their own way because they try to tell a story, and then they get a lot of advice that they think they have to follow completely.

They’re sure everybody else knows what’s best for their story. But if you listen too much to all the advice, you lose your voice, and you lose your capacity to tell your story in a unique way. You end up telling your story in someone else’s way or in a way that doesn’t resonate with anyone else. If you’re true to yourself and look for the thing that no one else has said in quite the way that you’re going to say it, that’s when your story shines. That’s when you bring something that nobody else could have written. Everybody else will have that little moment: Gosh, I wish I could have written this. The writing process also needs to include some other things like humility, an ability to work on things to make them better.

But it has to come from a place of confidence and belief, or it won’t resonate. That’s one of those words I also come back to: resonance.

M: Do you have any irons in the fire? Any future work we can look forward to?

D: I have a non-rhyming book coming out called Bloom. It’s about planting a garden of bulbs in the fall and then having them bloom in the spring.

I’m looking forward to that one. There are also more Pout-Pout Fish stories on their way. The next one up is The Not Very Merry Pout-Pout Fish, which has a holiday theme to it. I don’t know how long it will go on, but I’ll keep writing them as long as my editor keeps asking for them.

M: Maybe The Pout-Pout Fish movie?

D: I’ve always pictured in my head that Mr. Fish sounds a little like Garrison Keillor.

M: Maybe we can get Garrison Keillor for The Pout-Pout Fish. I’d watch that.

D: Me too.

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I L LU ST R AT I O N C O U RT E SY O F M O L L I E SPA R D E L L O

P O E T RY

The Butterfly

By Deborah Diesen Look at the butterfly flying in the air.

Don’t you wish you could be up there?

Flying so free, Without a care.

Don’t you wish you could be up there?

The wolves may holler In the breeze, But the butterfly is always at ease.

Look at him fly, Look at him fly.

Don’t you wish you could be in the sky?

All the things he sees, Flying with ease, Over the seas, Without a care, Up there in the air.

Don’t you wish you could be up there?

circa mid-1970s (more information on p. 58)

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PHOTOGRAPH BY BETHANY BRACHT

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COURTESY OF L AUREN DEIBERT EDITED BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

BY

LAUREN DEIBERT

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D

PATC H IS S

M

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F R O A B R O A

GIFTS RETURNED: D I S PATC H F R O M N I C A R AG U A

I

’ve been saying Nicaragua is a gifts culture ever since I was able to bargain for a hammock. Perhaps I heard it so many times from fellow missionaries that I started to believe it, or maybe I thought it would make me sound as though I was beginning to grasp at cultural competency. Maybe it was the many trinkets I was given in my first year here when I couldn’t speak a word of Spanish and people were trying in some way to show friendship. But the longer I’ve lived in Nicaragua, this year being my tenth, the more confused I have become about gifts—both giving and receiving them.

My husband, Mike, who has lived in Nicaragua for thirteen years, spent his first Christmases here buying what he thought were necessities—bicycles and cell phones—for his Nicaraguan friends. They promptly and unapologetically sold them. I have asked friends here what they wanted for birthdays and then happily wrapped up what they requested. Naturally, or maybe unnaturally to me, they sold those requested items, and when I came to visit them in their

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homes, they never tried to hide—like a good Southerner would—that there was in fact no shiny microwave on the counter.

While we receive almost outlandish hospitality in this country, we rarely receive actual gifts, and we have seldom given a gift and heard the words “thank you.” We accept this difference without condemnation just as we accept that half of the things on a restaurant’s menu are unavailable, that paying our house’s electric bill will take around two to three hours, and that if you invite a friend to dinner at 6 pm, they will show up at 8:30 pm and stay until midnight.

When it comes to ways of living that do not directly challenge God’s Word, we missionaries have to eat and drink the phrase, “It’s not wrong; it’s just different.”

By trade Mike is a blacksmith and bladesmith. He has been teaching trades in Nicaragua’s capitol, Managua, for the last nine years. Apprentices spend anywhere from six months to six years with us at our school, and along the way we teach each other what it looks like to live abundantly in Christ. Many have gone on to jobs and some have become teachers of trades. Many have started to value their marriages and participate in the lives of their children.

Many have learned to trust God again. And some have gone back to exactly what they did before—complaining about needing work while buying cell phones they can’t afford.

The context here is a complicated one. Few men have fathers who have been present in their lives—some because their fathers died in the war in the eighties and some because their fathers left their children in search of an unfettered life.

What’s more, the legalistic church here seems to repel men. Work is hard to come by, and it’s rarely seized with gusto when it’s offered. There is an overall sense of feeling defeated before one even starts.

Ramon Morales joined on as an apprentice about seven years ago. The son of a pastor, Ramon was a quiet man, the kind you respect instantly because there is nothing flippant in his manner. He listened and he worked. He has a wife, son, and daughter and lives on his teacher’s salary, $350 a month, which is a middle class wage for Nicaragua. Last year, Ramon became the first Central American journeyman bladesmith with the American Bladesmith Society after successfully passing a series of tests during a visit to the United States.

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“FOR THE LOVE

It is quite a thrill to watch Mike and RaOF GOD’S GLORY mon—one bald, white, and strong; the other P L AY E D O U T I N curly-headed, brown, and slight—dance together between the forge, grinder, and A R T, T H E Y A R E anvil. They value each other deeply. For the BROTHERS.” love of God’s glory played out in art, they are brothers. When we leave Nicaragua after over a decade on the field, Ramon will carry this vision of vocational education and discipleship through in a way we could never envision. We know this because the evidence of God’s work in Ramon rests easily and naturally in his countenance.

Recently, I went to drop off supplies at the school. Ramon was putting tools away and called me over in his quiet, undemanding way. He opened a drawer in the knife cabinet and showed me a beautiful new chopper with a perfect hamon, one of the best I’ve seen. He said, “Para Mike.” A gift. The knife would be worth about three months’ salary if Ramon were to sell it. He could sell it in an instant if he wanted to and finally build that bathroom for his house or put a floor in his daughter’s room.

But he wanted to thank Mike for seven years of friendship and artistry together, to offer a real gift, which was a sacrifice to give. Mike received it with fullness, really with an overflowing of all that he has carried in striving for the young men of this country. To have been given something like that was God’s grace in action—when we don’t need to be thanked for the time here and when we don’t deserve the sacrifice of three months’ salary, he gives it extravagantly.

So maybe Nicaragua isn’t, in fact, a gifts culture. But our God is certainly the giver of good and perfect gifts.

Lauren Deibert has had the privilege of living cross culturally for over a decade, both in marriage (as a Southerner married to a Midwesterner) and in location as a missionary to Nicaragua. She and Mike daily corral their three little boys who lead double lives as superheroes. Lauren grew up at the Advent, and Mike was happily married into it. Both are thankful for Advent’s partnership throughout their time in Nicaragua.

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LITURGY + MUSIC

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BY

H

ave you ever had that disappointed feeling after watching a movie made from a book you had already read? For some reason, the movie felt flat or dull, maybe even despite great acting, directing, or cinematography. Not everyone will agree with me, but I’ve felt that kind of letdown after seeing The Hunger Games and The Lord of the Rings.

What, in such instances, made the book feel more special and powerful than the movie? Maybe it comes down to which medium best immerses you in its story.

I know for the books-turned-movies, when I’ve experienced the movie’s disappointment, it often felt as though the movie moved too fast and that too

“UNTITLED” COURTESY OF FADI BOUKAR AM

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Getting Caught Up in the Story

many details were swept under the rug. I didn’t get a chance to sit with the characters, breathe in their surroundings, and hear their inner thoughts as I did with the book. My weeks-long immersion into their world felt cheapened by the two-hour movie, which, if anything, felt like a highlight reel for the true story. I anguished through Frodo and Sam’s grueling trek through Mordor in Tolkien’s book, but I have to admit that Peter Jackson’s portrayal of that journey went by so comparatively fast that its victorious climax didn’t pack the same punch.

But let’s go back to that feeling. You’re reading a great novel, and your world slows down, or maybe disappears. The sights and smells are so acute that you feel less like an outside observer and more like an invested insider. They are all-in moments where you’ve checked everything else at the door. The story takes you over. You don’t read it like a narrator. You live it like a character.

Dare I say (to radically shift gears) this is precisely what a worship service should feel like—an immersive experience of God’s cosmic story of radical grace, which so surrounds, disarms, and realigns your affections that you’re no longer reading and singing a liturgy, but instead being reborn in a story?

What if worship wasn’t so much reading death and resurrection, but feeling it?

What if worship was supposed to feel less like a rehearsed duty and more like your real-time biography? What if we aren’t supposed to be narrators of our liturgy’s story, but characters in it?

Most great worship services across varying Christian traditions begin with a scene-setting that displays the impeccable, inconceivable grandeur and glory of God. The Reformational tradition calls this landscape “the Law”—the Word that tells us God is God, and you are not. Some Christians sing about God’s high and lofty attributes (e.g., “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise” or “Holy, Holy, Holy”); others hear his unattainable Decalogue. If we were merely narrators of this story, we might feel a tinge of intellectual intrigue: “Interesting.

Thought-provoking. Hmm…” But as characters in the story, we aren’t so much intrigued as overwhelmed. We feel our smallness. If we’re honest, we feel our guilt. God’s white-hot glory boils to the surface all the big and small imperfections we’ve tried to microscopically disintegrate into the wash of our souls. God is dialing up the heat. This isn’t just a story anymore. It’s our story.

Confession time. That awkward, naked minute when we own up to all the things God already sees. That soul-crushing, pride-killing, Old-Adam-slaying moment when we’re backed into that dark corner as the Hound of Heaven gnashes his teeth and brandishes those sharp fangs. Then he lunges—straight

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for our neck. A narrator’s confession might sound like an eloquent recitation of one’s semi-heartfelt list of transgressions. A character’s confession feels like, well, blood-gurgled spurts while you’ve got jaws clenched around your throat.

Just when we think it’s the end, when it feels as if all the life has left our body, we find ourselves in the ER of absolution. As we doze in and out of consciousness, the Doctor begins telling us that the Hound actually saved our life. The sickness was so pervasive that we needed much more than treatment; we needed transfusion—a draining of the old and a filling of the new. We swoon and look to our left. To our surprise, the Hound is lying there on a surgical table beside us. “What?” we think, and we conk out.

“Wake up. Your sins are forgiven,” whispers the Nurse’s voice that woos us from the nightmarish anesthesia. We hastily gasp in a lung-full of air, the likes of which we haven’t experienced since our first post-womb breath. The Surgeon eventually walks in with clipboard-pulpit in hand and recounts the story of our journey. His sermon is at once authoritative and intimate—pervasive knowledge of the world, and detailed insight into us. The Nurse, dressing our wounds, nods in agreement as the Doctor talks. He reads his Text—and us—like a book. We relive the whole thing.

Instead of slapping us with a big medical bill, the Surgeon not only tells us, this one’s on the house, but he invites us to his home that evening for dinner with his family. That night, we weakly limp up to the door and ring the bell.

The door opens, and to our surprise that same Hound is running up to us with wagging tail and slobbering tongue, giving our skin a warm welcome, which assures us that we’re only here to be blessed. The Surgeon, looking less like an MD and more like Mr. Rogers, invites us to the table. We eat. We laugh. Every once in a while we pause to savor the food and this thought: “This side of death and resurrection, bread and wine never tasted so good.”

Wait … weren’t we talking about worship here? Perhaps we were getting too caught up in the story.

Zac Hicks is Pastor of Worship at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church (Ft. Lauderdale). As a wannabe Anglican, his hero is Thomas Cranmer. He writes weekly on worship at zachicks.com, has recorded a few albums overloaded with hymns, and is the author of The Worship Pastor (forthcoming: Zondervan, 2016). Zac will be a preacher at the Advent's Lenten Preaching Series in 2016.

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BY

GIL KRACKE

Joey Ramone, Easter, and Me I get so many things I don’t deserve.

—Bono

I

t seems I am often face-to-face with realities like powerlessness, ache and longing: a longing for connection, for relief, for being known. From there, not too long ago, I was reminded of Isaiah 45: lots of talk about God leveling exalted places, giving treasures of darkness and hoards in secret places.

Even now, I’m not sure if I want what he’s giving.

Throughout the chapter, God seems to pull us close and tease this longing, only to confound and confuse again. In a mastered understatement, Isaiah utters, “Truly, you are a God who hides himself.” Even Isaiah was stymied as he tried to make sense of how God makes himself known: the hidden God, unknown unless he makes himself known—by definition, free to remain God, and in his infinitude to retain a basic incomprehensibility.

That still leaves powerlessness and ache and longing.

As often happens for me, Bono enters as a conversation partner. A full disclaimer: I am aware that it has become decidedly uncool to be a fan of U2.

Oh well. I’ve listened to them religiously (pun intended) since I was a young teenager—nearly two-thirds of my life now. Many of their songs have worked their way to my bones. Paradoxically, in a strange way, I’m often grateful to have the songs as a reference point outside of myself—their canon is practically a liturgy to me.

The sweet sound of amazing grace connects a long-standing and recurring motif in Bono’s lyrics. The sound, song, or melody is the reality that penetrates the noise: the ache, fear and storm that pervade and permeate so much of our lives. When you hear about the song or melody, it is a giveaway that grace is near.

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ARTWORK BY CATHERINE BAKER , C O L E H A L L , J A N E A N N B A G G E T T, AND W YATT TR AMMELL O F T H E A D V E N T E PI S C O PA L S C H O O L

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“GOD IS NOT O N LY A G O D

Anything we know of God, we know only because WHO HIDES he has made himself known. “Truly, you are a God HIMSELF BUT who hides himself.” He is also a God who reveals himself, who makes himself known. The sound, ALSO ONE WHO song, and melody begin to reverberate and reveal: MAKES HIMSELF “He is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians).

“No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at KNOWN.” the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John).

“The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)” is the first song on U2’s latest album. The first time I heard it, even in passing, I thought it might have something to do with Lazarus. In my head, I think I even called it Lazarus’s Song, hearing the chorus as if it were Lazarus singing: I woke up at the moment when the miracle occurred Heard a song that made some sense out of the world Everything I ever lost, now has been returned In the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.

Hearing “a song” and the “most beautiful sound,” Lazarus awoke. The sound of Jesus’ voice—Lazarus, come out!—the most beautiful sound, as if it were a song awaking him from slumber. Not a bad hearing.

Later, I learned the background to the song. When Bono and the others in the band were starting as a teenage punk band, they snuck into a Ramones concert.

Bono took hope from hearing Joey Ramone, who famously sounded like a girl behind the mic. Bono needed an ego boost (that’s funny, if you know anything about him), as he screeched more than he sang. Ostensibly, the song is about the miracle of confidence Bono gained when he felt like he could also be a singer.

Don’t believe that for a second.

Bono is always burying double and triple entendres in his lyrics, especially with a judicious use of pronouns. One should never be certain a song is just about a girl when he sings of love. (With few exceptions, you can bet that it is not about that.)

The song turned me back to itself. Following U2’s rise, Joey Ramone and Bono had become friends (and it’s a good bet Bono didn’t have to sneak into many other concerts). Years later, Joey Ramone was listening to one of U2’s songs when he

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died in 2001. Knowledge of something like that leaves its mark, even on someone like Bono. Maybe the song had to do with Joey Ramone’s miracle: like Lazarus, the hope of his knowing life after death, rekindled by the sound, song, and melody?

Then it hit me. As I remembered the peculiar suffering evoked from the enigmatic word from Isaiah 45, I remembered that God is not only a God who hides himself but also one who makes himself known. And as I remembered these things, I found myself in the song.

The pronoun was for me. The song is an Easter song. The invasion of grace describes me, arrested and undressed yet again by the staggering reality of God’s love for one unworthy.

I woke up at the moment when the miracle occurred Heard a song that made some sense out of the world Everything I ever lost, now has been returned In the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.

The last chorus changes ever so slightly, just to make sure we don’t miss its graciousness: I get so many things I don’t deserve If there’s anything I don’t deserve, it is Easter. My dead ears strangely (miraculously) hear only one sound—the sound of the song that wakes me as God hides himself from me no longer. I don’t have to imagine what God is like anymore: the song has made some sense out of the world. God does who he is: He gives me so many things I don’t deserve because he is grace. Not disembodied grace, but grace incarnate, grace made flesh in the visible expression of the invisible God. Awake, O sleeper, and arise!

Though MTV seldom is confused with the road leading to Damascus, Gil Kracke was arrested by an appearance of “With or Without You” while walking through his living room sometime in 1987. Gil is now the Director of Adult Education and a licensed counselor at the Cathedral Church of the Advent.

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L I ST

A REREADING LIST

By Charlie Ritch

HAVE YOU EVE R PUR POSE F U L LY REREAD a book,

even before you’ve forgotten the plot? Even when you still remember the ending? The idea never occurred to me until I read the first book on this list. In it C. S. Lewis argues that most people do not reread books because they do not really read them in the first place. They use them. Many readers go to books only for distraction, escape, indulgent fantasy, or shoring up their own worldview.

Lewis argues that real reading means surrendering our agendas and embracing in full trust what the author offers. The best books reward this loving attention because they “enlarge our being,” making us more complete, more human. The best readers are on the hunt for such books, and when they find them they go back again and again. So here is a list of books I have found that are well-suited for this kind of reading.

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1

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis (1961)

2

The Warden by Anthony Trollope (1855)

3

A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor (1955)

4

Peace Like a River by Leif Enger (2001)

5

Jim the Boy and The Blue Star by Tony Earley (2000, 2008)

Here is the manifesto. There’s hardly a mention of faith, but Lewis’s proposal is probably the most Christian approach to reading there is. As he imagines it, reading really habituates us to the virtues required for a life of love and worship.

My copy of this book is just over 200 pages. Rereading is not a daunting prospect.

In the quaint county of Barsetshire, all the manners, character, and romance of Austen are seamlessly woven together with the wit and political insight of Dickens. Mr. Harding, the quiet, unassuming, but incredibly noble protagonist, will make an easy friend you will want to call upon as a matter of course.

Each story in this collection unsettles the reader with jarring images of a world that is clearly out of joint. Why would one come back to such stories? Well, O’ Connor is a prophet, and woe to those who shut their ears. But like the Hebrew prophets, she brings grace—and brings it in a way we wouldn’t hear in our complacency. Think of it like a visit to the most eloquent and artful doctor, who offers bad news in such an earnest manner you think you’d have him tell you nothing else.

Exciting, beautifully written, and oddly theological, this is the story of Davy Land, teenage son of Jeremiah and older brother to Reuben and Swede. Davy’s old-fashioned view of retribution lands him on the wrong side of the law. He runs, and his family drops everything to run after him. The pursuit is full of heartfelt love and mysterious miracles. It is worth reliving.

In some ways these coming-of-age novels could be a metaphor for reading itself.

Reading matures us by breaking our myopic narcissism. Readers like children must accept all that an author’s imaginative world brings—likewise with Jim Glass, a rural farm boy being raised by his mother and three uncles. His growth into manhood takes him through excitement, terror, joy, and disappointment as he wrestles with the dual forces of selfishness and nobility within him. This story will remind you why you read, and indeed why you might choose to reread.

Charlie Ritch is a teacher at the Westminster School of Oak Mountain. He is married to Alison Ritch and has four children with whom he has reread Mommy Mine and Good Night, Gorilla more times than he cares to count.

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O U R S TO RY

AN ARCHIVAL COMPOSITE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE RECTOR , WARDENS, AND VESTRY OF THE CHURCH OF THE ADVENT IN 1903.

JOHN G. MURR AY SERVED AS THE ADVENT ’S RECTOR FROM 1896-1903. HE WAS L ATER BISHOP COADJUTOR OF MARYL AND F R O M 19 0 9 - 1 1 , B I SH O P O F M A RY L A N D F R O M 19 1 1 - 2 5 , A N D WA S T H E F I R ST E L E C T E D PR E SI D I N G B I SH O P O F T H E E PI S C O PA L CHURCH FROM 1926-29. ROBERT H. PE ARSON SERVED AS SENIOR WARDEN FROM 1892-1909, AND ROBERT JEMISON, SR .

SERVED AS JUNIOR WARDEN FROM 1898-1909, L ATER SENIOR WARDEN FROM 1910-15. DOCUMENTATION ABOUT THE WARDENS IS UNAVAIL ABLE FROM 1916-21, BUT JEMISON WAS ALSO SENIOR WARDEN FROM 1922-26.

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ABOUT THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF THE ADVENT The Cathedral Church of the Advent was founded in 1872, one year after the city of Birmingham was founded, making the Advent one of the oldest churches in the city. Our 3,700-member congregation comprises one of the largest Episcopal parishes in the United States, and since 1982 the Advent has served as the cathedral for the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama.

The Advent is a Gospel-centered church, with a “living, daring confidence in God’s grace” (Martin Luther) evident in our many programs and ministries.

Holding to what the Letter of Jude calls “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints,” this Gospel focus finds the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus ever and only at the center. The most comprehensive summation of our traditional Anglican doctrine is found in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. The “fruits” of our theology are: A HEART FOR THE GOSPEL When we say we have a heart for the Gospel, we mean that we are passionate about lifting Jesus up in his life, death, and resurrection. Only Jesus has the power to change the heart of a sinner.

A HEART FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOT HEARD THE GOSPEL There are still people in the world (even in Birmingham) who have never heard the Gospel. In obedience to Christ, and with a compassion for others, we (who are consciously aware of our own sinfulness) put forth this message of Christ’s love for those who have never heard.

A HEART FOR THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN BURNED BY THE CHURCH Many in our culture have had an experience with the Church that has turned them away from the faith. A majority of those whom sociologists call “Nones”— those who claim no religious affiliation—say they grew up in the Church. Jesus has a particular love for those burned by the Church.

A HEART FOR THE CITY OF BIRMINGHAM The Advent has been a presence in Birmingham from its very beginning. We are a vibrant congregation full of talented and creative believers in the Lord Jesus. We have always sought to bring the transforming power of grace to those in need around us, and we have also worked to bless the city through the arts, historical preservation, and community involvement. The Gospel touches all areas of life, and we have a heart for the city that God has called us to minister to.

In all of these things we pray that Jesus Christ is glorified and that he might use us in Birmingham and beyond.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

E L E VATO R S P E E C H E S ADULT EDUCATION

House Prayer Ministry, and for six weeks each year, it serves as a meeting place for the Advent’s Grief Recovery Group. Additionally, it is used as temporary lodging by visiting missionaries, seminarians, and guest speakers.

Anyone—church member and community resident alike—is welcome and may request prayer for healing or discernment from God.

Standing squarely in the tradition that emphasizes the ministries of preaching and teaching, the Advent has a robust, year-round adult education program. In addition to numerous classes at 10:10 am each Sunday morning, there are quite a few special events and programs held throughout the year. Whether it is traditional Bible study or the consideration of theological and cultural intersections, the Advent’s adult education holds a focus on the Gospel and its proclamation of Good News for sinners.

Kathy Logue, kathylogue@gmail.com, 205.410.4622

ARTS + CULTURE SERIES

Gil Kracke, gil@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3516

The Arts + Culture Series is a forum for exploring common ground between everyday life and the Church, primarily through performances, talks, and conversations with artists, authors, musicians, cultural critics, and community leaders. The series has an outreach focus, seeking to foster relationships and ongoing dialogue between the Church and the Greater Birmingham community in compelling and accessible ways. Each gathering also typically features sponsoring culinary artists who provide high-quality food and drinks.

THE ADVENT BOOK STORE As an extension of its work of preaching and teaching, the Advent has a small but vital bookstore. Not trying to be all things to all people, the Episcopal Book Store knows its niche, providing books and other resources that reflect a living confidence in the Gospel. In addition to books, the store maintains an attractive selection of art, gifts, music, and other items.

Matt Schneider, matt@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3502

Cindy Funderburk, cfunderburk@episcobooks.com, 205.323.2959

BIBLE STUDIES At the Advent, small groups differ from Bible studies in that small groups are typically closed groups of a few people who study the Bible, while Bible studies are always open.

Some Bible studies are gender-specific, and others are open to everyone. The Advent’s Bible studies meet throughout the week and

ADVENT HOUSE Located between Highland Park and English Village at 2317 Arlington Avenue, Advent House is a center for prayer, teaching, and respite. It is home year-round to the Advent

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are usually led by the same leader or leaders each week; the style of the group—whether conversational or more lecture-oriented— typically depends on the group’s size. The Advent has a talented team of engaging and faithful Bible study leaders, all of whom love the Gospel message and wish for others to mine the riches of the Bible.

Joe Gibbes, gibbes@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3549

THE CATHEDRAL CHOIR The Cathedral Choir is a semi-professional ensemble, comprised of both professional and volunteer singers. The Choir plays a vital role in the life of the Advent and stands as a model of musical excellence to the parish, the Diocese of Alabama, and the Birmingham region.

In many respects, the Choir is its own small group, whose members are drawn together by their love of music and the choral tradition. The Cathedral Choir sings for the nine and eleven o’clock Sunday services, Choral Evensong, and concerts throughout the year.

Interested singers with choral experience and proficiency in reading music may schedule an audition.

Fred Teardo, teardo@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3506

THE CATHEDRAL CONCERT SERIES AND MID-DAY MUSIC The Advent’s special music events are a vital part of its music ministry. By offering such events, not only are we able to expand the opportunities for our parishioners to experience sacred music, but we are also able to extend our ministry to the community-at-large. The Cathedral Concert Series is committed to bringing the very best artists and ensembles in the world to present concerts of sacred music in Birmingham. The Cathedral Choir is also featured, performing extended sacred works. Concerts are typically at 7:30 pm on select evenings or on Sunday afternoons at 3 82

pm. The Mid-Day Music series is primarily dedicated to presenting local musicians and particularly serves as a ministry to downtown Birmingham. All programs are on Fridays at 12:30 pm and are thirty minutes in length.

Fred Teardo, teardo@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3506

THE CATHEDRAL RINGERS The Cathedral Ringers is the Advent’s adult handbell choir, performing with a five-octave set of Malmark handbells during Sunday services (monthly from October through April) and concerts in the Mid-Day Music series. The handbell choir always welcomes new members who have a basic level of music-reading ability, regardless of handbell experience. Whether a seasoned handbell player or a novice musician with the desire to increase your musical abilities, this is the group for you.

Fred Teardo, teardo@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3506

THE CHILDREN’S CHOIR The Advent aims to develop a nationally renowned children’s chorister program (grades 1-6) committed to musical excellence, catechesis, and the Gospel. Through structured curriculum and service to both the Advent and the greater community, choristers learn the fundamentals of music and musicianship as well as the music of the church. The Children’s Choir sings in the nine o’clock Sunday service several times from September through April.

By learning musical settings of the Psalms, the Gospels, and other passages of Scripture, choristers receive a unique education in how music can teach the Word of God. Fred Teardo, teardo@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3506

CHILDREN’S MINISTRY Seeking to serve as a partnership between the home and the church, the Children’s MinisTHE ADVENT

try at the Advent comes alongside parents and grandparents by sharing the Gospel with children. We desire that by the power of the Holy Spirit they might recognize both their sin and God’s faithfulness to rescue through the death and resurrection of his son, Jesus Christ. Sunday school classes communicate this message via age-appropriate activities, including storytelling, art, games, music and Children’s Chapel. Additionally, special programs are offered seasonally throughout the year: a Posada during Advent, the Easter Walk during Easter, and Vacation Bible School during the summer.

of the basics of Christianity in a relaxed and fun atmosphere.

Deborah Leighton, deborah@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3511

DAUGHTERS OF THE KING Daughters of the King (DOK) is a national organization devoted to prayer, service, and evangelism, and the Advent shares in this mission and vision. The local chapter at the Advent prays for the Church catholic in addition to the needs and concerns of our own congregation. Each Daughter (or member) takes an oath to commit to regular prayer, which is signified by the cross that every Daughter wears daily with its Latin inscription that reads, “With heart, mind, and spirit, uphold and bear the cross.” Prayers are guarded carefully, reviewed regularly, and revised as prayer needs change. Daughters at the Advent convene at various times of the year to pray with each other and are available for any who are in need of prayer. The website for DOK can be found at doknational.com.

Elizabeth Wilson, elizabeth@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3547

COLLEGE MINISTRY The College Ministry seeks to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to students in Birmingham, ministering primarily to Birmingham-Southern College, Samford University, and UAB. In addition to supporting students in their life on campus, we also wish to help them become integrated into the life of the wider church body. All college students are invited to attend the Young Adult Bible Study on Monday evenings (7:30 pm) at Cranmer House.

Julia King, juliaking@bellsouth.net, 256.239.2350

EPISCOPAL CHURCH WOMEN & GUILDS

Brandon Bennett, brandon@cathedraladvent.com, 205.443.8560

The (ECW) Episcopal Church Women at the Advent is part of a larger, church-wide body of women committed to one another and called to be witnesses to Christ. The guilds provide a variety of opportunities for women, including age-similar guilds that meet regularly for study and fellowship and also multi-generational service guilds that provide an array of services, from preparing the altar to tending the gardens. The ECW also serves the Birmingham community through many programs, perhaps the most recognizable of which is the Lenten Lunches ministry.

Through this enormous undertaking of feeding our city—body and soul—the ECW raises

CURSILLO Cursillo, which takes its name from a Spanish word that means “little course,” was originally a renewal ministry in the Roman Catholic Church. In the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama, Cursillo occurs five times a year for a three-day weekend at Camp McDowell.

Its impact reaches beyond these individual weekends though. Filled with community building, song, and learning, each weekend aims to provide attendants with a tangible experience of grace while they learn some 83

tens of thousands of dollars that go directly to fund the Advent’s outreach programs both at home and abroad.

Tamara Sansbury, tamara.sansbury@gmail.com, 205.249.3523

FELLOWSHIP GROUPS Fellowship groups are a great way to meet people from the Advent in your age demographic. Each group typically meets three or four times per year. The meetings are often held in members’ homes, and there is always food—either heavy horsd’oeuvres or a light supper. Sometimes there is a brief talk by a guest speaker. The groups include the “Twenty-somethings” (ages 22–29), “Saints & Sinners” (ages 30–39), “Happy Mediums” (ages 40–49), and “Advent Boomers” (ages 50–69).

Miriam Morris, jcmmbm@gmail.com, 205.970.0237

FIVE O’CLOCK WORSHIPING COMMUNITY The five o’clock Sunday worship service is a modern and casual expression of traditional Anglican liturgy in keeping with the ethos of the Advent’s morning services (see “Worship Services”) while in a more informal environment. The music is primarily hymnody set to modern musical arrangements, accessible and fresh for modern ears, with a band leading congregational singing. Worship lasts about one hour with occasional fellowship suppers following the service. Nursery care is provided for small children, though children of all ages are welcome and encouraged to join us for worship. This community currently worships in the refectory downtown, but we will be moving to the new Cranmer House in Homewood once the building renovations are complete.

Matt Schneider, matt@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3502

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GLOBAL MISSION At the very end of his ministry on earth, Jesus told his followers that he would strengthen them so that they could tell people from every ethnicity about the grace available through him. Two thousand years later, the Advent continues to live into this calling through long-term partnerships with other Christians around the world, such as a family working on a Bible translation for a remote people group in Southeast Asia and an international agency that sends non-Western missionaries into Muslim countries. Our tithes and offerings support projects like these around the world.

Adventers may partner in prayer and in the occasional opportunity to travel abroad to provide encouragement in person.

Deborah Leighton, deborah@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3511

LENTEN PREACHING SERIES AND LENTEN LUNCHES For over a century, the Advent has hosted the Lenten Preaching Series and Lenten Lunches, a series of daily sermons during Lent with accompanying meals prepared by parishioners.

Preachers from around the world attract both those who work in downtown Birmingham and those who make a trip especially for this unique opportunity. One of the Advent’s most intensive and expansive ministries, the Lenten preaching and lunches nourish both body and soul.

Gil Kracke, gil@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3516

LOCAL OUTREACH Broken relationships produce poverty, and every human being labors under it, whether spiritual or material. Recognizing that Jesus Christ alone brings true relief, healing, and transformation, church members seek to reach beyond the walls of the Advent in order to be instruments of God’s grace among the weak, the hurting, and the poor in our neighborTHE ADVENT

hood. Thus, we partner with ministries that provide long-term strategies for poverty alleviation in the name of Jesus, and our tithes and offerings support projects in Alabama and elsewhere in the United States.

Because the nursery is a child’s earliest contact with the Church, we seek to plant the seeds of the Gospel through prayers, Bible verses, and songs of praise on Sunday mornings while older children participate in crafts and circle time. The nursery is located on the second floor and is available during the nine, eleven, and five o’clock worship services.

Deborah Leighton, deborah@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3511

Becky Rothrock, rebecca@cathedraladvent.com, 205.443.8552

MEN’S MINISTRY The Men’s Ministry at the Advent seeks to help men understand how to apply the Gospel to their lives. This occurs through men’s weekly Bible studies and events such as cookouts in homes or lunches at the church, often with a keynote speaker. We also hold four-day backpacking trips twice a year: one in the spring and one in the fall. All of these programs aim to help men grow in their confidence, courage, and ability to live a Gospel-shaped life.

PARISH RETREAT The Parish Retreat is a relaxing opportunity in the fall to connect with others. There are some planned times of worship and teaching, but there are wide margins in the schedule to eat leisurely, meet with people, be in solitude, and participate in recreational activities. While nursery care is available at certain points for the little ones, options abound for all ages: ropes course, climbing wall, hiking, field games, swimming, square dancing, and watching college football. Accommodation choices are on a first-come, first-served basis.

Registration and information is available at adventbirmingham.org/retreat.

Joe Gibbes, gibbes@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3549

NEWCOMERS MINISTRY As its name suggests, the Newcomers Ministry welcomes new people to the Advent. If you are looking for a church home, interested in transferring from another church, or considering confirmation as an adult, please join us in the Newcomers and Inquirers Class. The fall class begins the first Sunday in September, and the spring class begins the first Sunday in March, culminating with confirmation in early May. The class meets during the education hour from 10:10 am to 10:50 am in the Living Room adjacent to Clingman Commons.

Brandon Bennett, brandon@cathedraladvent.com, 205.443.8560

PASTORAL CARE Pastoral care is simply one of the ways that we care for one another at the Advent. Whether in times of celebration, such as baptisms or weddings, or in times of trial, such as before surgery or during times of illness or grief, we seek to come alongside one another. In addition to the clergy, there are numerous volunteers from the church who participate in bringing the Good News to and caring for both new and familiar faces.

Sandy Blalock, sandy@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3519

NURSERY The nursery provides young children, ages six weeks through two years, with a safe, loving Christian environment, which, in turn, gives parents respite and time for spiritual renewal.

Robin Turner, robin@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3500

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PASTORAL COUNSELING

SMALL GROUPS

Life can often be exhausting and overwhelming. Periods of trial, loneliness, sadness, fear, grief, and more are common parts of the human experience and often take their toll on many of us. The Pastoral Counseling ministry exists to come alongside those who are weary and burdened, and we desire to offer guidance, help, and relief.

Small groups are one of the best ways to be involved at the Advent. God created humans to be relational, and we need others to help us apply the Gospel to our lives. Typically consisting of ten to twelve people, the Advent’s small groups provide a place to connect, to encourage one another with the Good News of Jesus Christ, to study the Bible, to pray communally, and to serve others.

Robin Turner, robin@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3500

RALLY DAY PICNIC Rally Day falls on the Sunday after Labor Day. Hosted by the Advent’s vestry, it is the kickoff for the Sunday school and program year. The entire congregation celebrates with an evening picnic at the Birmingham Children’s Zoo with an animal exhibit, merry-go-round, petting barn, bingo, and the classic cake walk. There is a lot of food, from barbecue to cotton candy to snow cones. No reservations needed.

Stephen McCarthy, mccarthy@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3548

Fontaine Pope, fontaine@cathedraladvent.com, 205.443.8562

STEWARDSHIP The Advent promotes the fundamental principle of spiritual giving, free acts done willingly and cheerfully. Such a posture extends beyond tithing to include offering our time and talents for the benefit of others. The opportunities are numerous, from leading a small group to teaching the youth in Sunday school. Biblical principles foster and reinforce this stewardship philosophy, so we as caretakers desire to utilize God’s provision for supporting the needs of the Church and extending the Gospel elsewhere.

Todd Liscomb, todd@thecenterbham.org, 205.529.6643

SENIORS MINISTRY For those aged sixty and older, the Seniors Ministry at the Advent cultivates an environment of togetherness in Christ and also promotes various opportunities for service, fellowship, and worship. This ministry interacts with the entire congregation while focusing on the unique gifts, freedom, and perspective this time of life may offer. Participants enjoy a variety of activities, including meeting for meals, traveling to concerts, sacking lunches for the homeless, assisting in outreach ministries, praying together, and sharing stories.

Katherine Kilpatrick, katherine@cathedraladvent.com, 205.443.8559

WOMEN’S MINISTRY Recognizing that women are frequently called to serve and volunteer in various ways in family and social life, the women’s ministry committee provides multiple opportunities throughout the year for women to do nothing but simply receive from God. Some of these opportunities include spring and fall coffee socials with special guest speakers, a Christmas event in the first week of December, and a weekend retreat at Lake Martin every August. Women on the committee are also involved in leading various Bible studies, healing prayer groups, and a two-year-long discipleship class overseen by the clergy.

Deborah Leighton, deborah@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3511

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WORSHIP SERVICES

Communion service on Wednesdays at 12:05 pm in Meyer Chapel and a monthly service of Evensong in the Nave during the academic year.

The Advent is a traditional place, using Rite I, alternating between Communion and Morning Prayer, wearing traditional clerical attire, and singing old hymns. We don’t do these things for aesthetic reasons or because we like Elizabethan English. We do them because they convey the Gospel message that “Christ Jesus came to save sinners.” Rite I not only tells us the truth about our own condition, but it also tells us about the marvelous grace of Jesus Christ manifested in his death, directing our thoughts and worship toward him and away from us. We use Morning Prayer because we believe preaching is central to worship. We wear the cassock and surplice not to set ourselves apart, but that you might not gaze upon our own garments. And the hymns we sing are more about God than they are about us. Sunday worship times are 7:30 am, 9 am, and 11 am in the Nave. For information about the Sunday 5 pm service, please see “Five O’clock Worshiping Community.” We also hold a weekly

Andrew Pearson, andrew@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3510

YOUTH MINISTRY The Advent’s Youth Ministry seeks to meet students with the Good News of what has already been accomplished for them in Jesus. As we partner with parents and all generations of the Church, students are invited to rest, learn, and be encouraged through our weekly Bible studies, breakfast groups, Sunday school, dinners, trips, and other outings. Amidst all of the pressures and anxieties of the world today, we look to the comfort, peace, and joy of a lifelong relationship with Jesus Christ.

Cameron Cole, cameron@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3545

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M I N I S T RY H I G H L I G H T S NEW CRANMER HOUSE IN HOMEWOOD

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or the past three years, Cranmer House has served as the Advent’s Over the Mountain annex located in Mountain Brook Village. This space is mostly used for regular midweek Bible studies, some small group meetings, youth activities, and occasional events. However, we have quickly outgrown this space, which cannot accommodate large crowds comfortably and does not have accessible restrooms. Therefore, last year a subcommittee of the Vestry set out to search for a new location, also Over the Mountain, that is more spacious and accessible.

We are pleased to announce that the Advent’s new Cranmer House will be in Homewood’s central business district at 2814 Linden Avenue, one block from the 18th Street 88

corridor. This convenient and informal space will also be used in many of the same ways as our current location with the added benefit of a little extra space that will provide room for growth. In addition to two large gathering spaces, the new building also will have a nursery, and several program staff members, including our youth ministry team, will have their offices there. Another exciting development is that our five o’clock worship service will soon be moving from the refectory downtown to this new location in Homewood.

One important point to note about this new location is that we will have a small amount of dedicated parking, something we lack in Mountain Brook. The property itself has about four parking spaces in front of the building on Linden Avenue and about seven spaces behind the building in the alley between Linden Avenue and Crescent Avenue. We are THE ADVENT

PHOTOGRAPHS BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

also authorized to use parking spaces at three neighboring properties after regular weekday business hours and over the weekends at 2805 and 2809 Crescent Avenue, and the thirteen parking spaces immediately adjacent to our building in the Wells Fargo parking lot at 1725 28th Street South. Those attending Cranmer House events are encouraged to help us be good neighbors by respecting our authorized parking spaces.

Cross, and joyful energy radiates at the Sunday services. Both membership and giving are trending upward, and people are lingering after the services to catch up with one another over a cup of coffee.

In February 2015 Holy Cross began the Alpha Course on Wednesday nights with well over half of the active parish membership involved. Additionally, many Adventers served the Alpha program in numerous ways, including small groups that provided meals and volunteers who staffed the nursery. The blossoming community and spiritual growth have been great blessings for Holy Cross, and the opportunities to serve within the diocese have been good for the Advent.

This next year will be an exciting year for Holy Cross as we pray they will discern God’s provision and calling of their next rector. The goal of this partnership will have been met if the next rector can step into a healthy parish and continue the Gospel-centered ministry, enthusiasm, and growth that the parish has experienced in partnership with the Advent.

Brandon Bennett, brandon@cathedraladvent.com, 205.443.8560

THE ADVENT MEETS CHURCH OF THE HOLY CROSS IN TRUSSVILLE

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n the summer of 2013, Canon Joe Gibbes and then-Canon Andrew Pearson met with the staff of the Diocese of Alabama to explore ways in which the Advent might share our resources specifically with another parish. A year later, the Advent was invited into a partnership with Church of the Holy Cross in Trussville. In November 2014 Canon Gibbes was appointed as their interim rector.

Trussville is a growing suburban community to the northeast of Birmingham. Church of the Holy Cross is located off Highway 11, near the center of the city. Despite its excellent location, sustained growth had not been part of Holy Cross’s recent history. Their rector had been called to another church; without a rector, the parish did not have a clear sense of their identity and calling. Congregational morale was low. In coordination with the Holy Cross vestry, Canon Gibbes has sought to encourage reasonable facility updates and strategic, Gospel-centered initiatives.

From the pulpit, Canon Gibbes preaches honestly about human sin and excitedly about Jesus as our gracious Savior. Many Adventers and other enthusiastic friends of this ministry pray regularly for the Holy Spirit to fill Holy

Joe Gibbes, gibbes@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3549

ADVENT EPISCOPAL SCHOOL AT SIXTY-FIVE

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he Advent Episcopal School is truly blessed to have strong ties with the Cathedral Church of the Advent, sharing a mutual desire to make a difference both in and outside the city. The school was founded in 1950

by Mrs. Clifford McWhorter as an outgrowth of the Sunday school program of the Cathedral Church of the Advent. This long-standing and synergistic relationship has helped propel students to achieve unparalleled success while simultaneously sharing with students the love of Christ.

From its humble beginnings solely as a kindergarten, the Advent Episcopal School has grown to become a nationally recog-

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nized school with a reputation for academic excellence. Boasting above a 90 percent average score on national standardized tests, the pre-kindergarten through eighth grade students do not merely achieve academic success but are also well-rounded as a result of the school’s training in music, art, religion, foreign language, technology, and athletics.

The curriculum is advanced, with classes using textbooks one grade level above their current grade. Consequently, Advent graduates are aggressively recruited by both local high schools and nationally renowned boarding schools.

In addition to the partnership with and proximity to the Cathedral Church of the Advent, the school also holds dear its downtown location, which puts a wide range of cultural and civic jewels literally at the school’s doorway, such as the Birmingham Museum of Art, the McWane Science Center, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and the Birmingham Public Library. The school currently attracts students from forty-four different zip codes as well as very diverse backgrounds; and empathetic to the needs of parents, the school offers students the ability to start their school day at 7:15 am and stay until 6 pm.

Under the leadership of Headmaster Palmer Kennedy, the school is augmenting its already advanced curriculum with the addition of cutting-edge programs such as STEM Labs (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) for all grades, Robotics in the upper grades, and NeuroNet cognitive learning program for the lower grades (the NeuroNet exercises combine rhythmic movement patterns with basic reading, writing, and math skills in order to automate those skills). Also new, Panther Camp (PreK to third grade) and SummerSolstice (fourth to eighth grades) provide both Advent and non-Advent students a number of summer enrichment programs that offer both academic and athletic opportunities from 7:30 am to 5:30 pm.

Advent Episcopal School, info@adventepiscopalschool.org, 205.252.2535

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UNIQUE CURACY FELLOWSHIP FOR NEWLY ORDAINED CLERGY

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ne of the greatest issues facing the Episcopal Church is a lack of creativity and leadership. Our seminaries do a very good job of producing clergy who can serve in the Episcopal Church, but that is exactly what we don’t need. We need individuals who can think creatively and lead boldly in taking the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

Granted, anyone graduating from seminary is not coming out with all the tools needed in one’s toolbox for ordained ministry, so he or she can benefit from some on-the-ground training in the earliest years.

In much of the Anglican Communion, the newly ordained are placed at a healthy and sizable parish where they can learn the ropes.

Such an opportunity has historically been known as a “curacy,” but curacies have become very uncommon in American parishes of the Episcopal Church. To that end, the Advent recently began a Curacy Fellows program.

The Advent wants to find the best and the brightest graduating from our seminaries and bring them here where they can build a solid foundation for their ministries. Curates will normally serve on our clergy staff for about two years, but we won’t kick them out after that time if they may benefit from staying longer. Nor will we make them stay if God is leading them elsewhere.

Our current Curates are Stephen McCarthy and Adam Young. When our Curates leave the Advent, we hope they will either go on to be the rector of another church or plant new churches. The Advent is making a difference in the Episcopal Church, and we pray that God continues to raise up laborers in the vineyard through our Curacy Fellows program and beyond.

Andrew Pearson, andrew@cathedraladvent.com, 205.226.3510

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ADVENT STUFF

THE ADVENT ’S 1985 MERCEDES-BENZ 300SD TURBO DIESEL . IT HAS A 5-CYLINDER DIESEL ENGINE WITH A 4-SPEED AUTOMATIC T R A N SM I S SI O N. A PA R I SH I O N E R D O N AT E D I T I N 2004. MERCEDES-BENZ U.S. INTERNATIONAL , INC. IS ONE OF THE L ARGEST EMPLOYERS IN THE STATE OF AL ABAMA , AND THE ROUTE FOR THE MERCEDES MAR ATHON IN DOWNTOWN B I R M I N G H A M PA S SE S T H E A D V E N T E A C H Y E A R .

IT IS ALWAYS ON A SUNDAY MORNING.

PHOTOGRAPH BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

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RETROSPECT

AN ARCHIVAL 1924 LETTER FROM RECTOR EMERITUS CHARLES CLINGMAN TO FORMER SENIOR WARDEN ROBERT JEMISON, SR. UPON ACCEPTING HIS CALL AS THE RECTOR OF THE CHURCH OF THE A D V E N T ( 19 24 - 3 6 ) . C L I N G M A N C O M M O N S , O U R PA R I SH H A L L , I S N A M E D F O R C H A R L E S C L I N G M A N.

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A GOOD WORD

By Andrew Pearson

O Andrew Pearson is the Dean of the Advent. He is an avid golfer, outdoorsman, and reader. He is married to Lauren Saddler Pearson, and they have three daughters, Lily, Mary Cabell, and Ware.

ne of the greatest issues facing the Church today is a lack of creativity and thoughtfulness in ministry.

It has been rightfully said that the Church often preaches answers to questions that nobody is asking. It’s no wonder that many feel alienated and burned by the Church. So much preaching and ministry seems to be divorced from real life. There may be some helpful hints for living, but what most of us need is healing.

Creativity and thoughtfulness require a great deal of self-awareness and, in turn, vulnerability. To produce art (or even a sermon) is to put a piece of oneself on display, open to judgment. This is, understandably, a risky and terrifying proposition. But this is also exactly what Jesus did. He could only be himself, and his startling life of one-way love and beauty ultimately led to judgment and death.

Most would rather walk in darkness, so in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago there was an attempt to extinguish the Light. But the Light could not be put out. Creative expression has the quality of light in life—it ought to shine on what is good and what is beautiful; it ought to show a thing as it is. The Church at its best has been at the forefront of art, architecture, music, etc. Christians have been salt in the world. The presence of Christians is meant to enhance the flavor of life and make something that would otherwise be bland worth savoring.

Rather than retreat into Christian ghettos or attempted trendiness, the Church is called to engage the world and put forward answers to questions hearts are asking. We see this happening at and through the Advent. Our parish is engaged in creative and thoughtful ministry from its preaching to our outreach to the arts community in Birmingham and beyond.

But the real testimony is the parish itself—not the building, but the people who worship and serve at the Advent.

I hope that as you read this magazine the Lord himself will speak to you. At the very least, you should have a very good idea of what the Advent is all about. This publication is a small testimony to God’s work in this place and among our parishioners, who because of Jesus’ grace and mercy have a heart for the city of Birmingham.

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ADVENT A Magazine of Good News @cathedraladvent #adventbham magazine@cathedraladvent.com adventbirmingham.org/magazine Made in Birmingham, Alabama By the Cathedral Church of the Advent