FROM THE RECTOR: NATURE AND NURTURE

A week ago an article in the Wall Street Journal caught my attention, “Genes Often Get Shuffled in Our DNA Deck” (October 11, 2013) by Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University. It seems that “strict genetic inheritability” isn’t quite as strict as we thought. He writes, “. . . bacteria and immune systems have gene-transposition races, with the former shuffling genes to come up with means to evade immune systems and the latter shuffling to get the means to destroy novel bacteria.”

FROM THE RECTOR: RE-SEE

The other morning a word that isn’t in the dictionary came out of my mouth: “re-see.” Without thinking I used it to mean “to look again,” in the same way we use “rehear.” I smiled when I realized what I had done. It made me recall a lesson I was privileged to learn from a woman who became a parishioner when I was rector in Indiana.

FROM THE RECTOR: EVENING GRACE

When I was in San Francisco in September I attended Daily Evening Prayer twice at Grace Cathedral. Quite frankly, I was very glad to see so many of the cathedral clergy in attendance both days. The service was different in some ways from what we do here, but I felt very much at home at Grace. It was Evening Prayer from the Prayer Book. I want to tell you about what I experienced.

FROM THE RECTOR: SAINT MICHAEL & ALL ANGELS

This Sunday is the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels. Our guest preacher will be the Reverend Dr. David Graeme Wood, parish priest, Grace Church, Joondalup, Perth, Australia. Father Wood has been staying in the rectory this month and has been helping with weekday Masses—

FROM THE RECTOR: DOWN AND UP

This past week I was away from the parish to attend the semi-annual workshop of Leadership in Ministry that I’ve attended since the spring of 1997. The workshop is held at the Lost River Retreat Center in Hardy County, West Virginia. I’ve known that place since 1980, when it was bought by the church where my uncle, Lawrence Matthews, served as senior pastor for many years. Larry, who retired from Vienna Baptist Church, Vienna, Virginia in 1998, was the founder of these workshops, which were designed to be affordable for clergy who wanted to study Bowen Family Systems Theory. Larry retired from the workshops in 2010 and I’m really glad they have continued.

FROM FATHER SMITH: THE GLORY OF GOD SHALL BE REVEALED 

Many of the lives of the saints begin with a story about conversion. To be more accurate, many saint’s lives begin by introducing the reader to an apparently average sort of person, a person who is more or less involved in the same sorts of things as are his neighbors. Then, then, suddenly, out of the blue, something happens and there is a change of direction, a reversal, a turning back or a turning toward;

FROM THE INTERIM MUSIC DIRECTOR: MUSIC AS GIFT

Every church-going Christian has heard repeatedly the scriptural imperatives to “make a joyful noise before the Lord,” and to “sing a new song unto the Lord.” We are told in the Second Book of the Chronicles, “to make one sound of music to be heard in praise and thanksgiving to the Lord” (5:13). This passage is contained within a description of the great service of consecration held in Israel’s first Temple, a service that involved cymbals, harps, 150 trumpets, and a sufficient number of singers to balance it all! No mention of the budget for this event is given! Exactly what form this music took we do not know precisely, but, that music was an essential element of Temple worship, we know absolutely.

FROM THE RECTOR: TRUSTING THE SPIRIT

I’ve just started reading a book by Allegra di Bonaventura who teaches at Yale, For Adam’s Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England (2013). It’s based on an extraordinary diary by a Connecticut shipwright, Joshua Hempstead (1678–1758). The diary is about Hempstead’s life and the world in which he lives, but di Bonaventura’s focus is on the life of his enslaved servant Adam Jackson (c.1701–c.1764).

FROM THE RECTOR: ANOTHER DEATH IN MY FAMILY

My mother’s younger brother, Donny Matthews, died on Wednesday. He died in the house he himself built in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and where he and his wife Edna reared their three children. He was seventy-seven years old. Like my mother, my uncle suffered in recent years from Alzheimer’s disease. His wife, three children, and their families will miss him terribly.

FROM THE RECTOR: THE YEAR AHEAD

I think the average member of the Church would be amazed at how much time rectors spend on the details of worship. One of the significant downsides to General Convention’s ongoing liturgical revisions since 1979 has been to create what can only be called calendar and lectionary chaos. There are so many options now that if you care even a little about worship you have to spend a lot of time sorting it out. This is especially true in parishes where there are daily services.

FROM THE RECTOR: MYSTERY OF GOOD

Some years ago I realized I would always be learning something about the Bible that I didn’t know before. This kind of discovery can happen while I am reading an academic commentary. More often it happens when I am listening to lessons being read at Morning or Evening Prayer. Just this morning I heard again the story of King David arranging the murder of Uriah the Hittite (2 Samuel 11:1-27). I heard something new. I heard in a new way how David plotted to do evil, to become a murderer.

FROM THE RECTOR: AWAY FROM HOME

When I was in high school I was vaguely aware of bluegrass music. Sometime while I was in college I heard about a band from the Washington, D.C., area called The Seldom Scene. Their first album, Act 1, came out in 1972. The group stayed close to home and I heard them play a couple of times in Alexandria—once with my dad and stepmother who turned out also to be fans.

FROM THE RECTOR: SIGNS OF COMMITMENT

There was an uproar when, in the run up to the present Prayer Book, the Standing Liturgical Commission published Prayer Book Studies 18: On Baptism and Confirmation (1970). It proposed that the Episcopal Church return to a “unified” rite of Christian initiation. The rite would encompass all of the following as normative: a public commitment of faith, washing with water in the names of the Trinity, the laying on of hands, anointing with chrism and the reception of Communion. The bishop would “normally” be the “chief minister” of the service, but in his absence a priest could officiate and say and do all that a bishop would do.

FROM THE RECTOR: SARA LOUIE COOKE, 1841-1892

Behind the open double doors in the center of the narthex there are two memorial plaques commissioned by the board of trustees in 1897. The first plaque to be approved was not the memorial to William Scott, who died in 1889, but the one for Sara Louie Cooke, who died on July 21, 1892. Scott was the first president of the board of trustees of this parish and a generous benefactor in his lifetime—he was also the first rector’s father-in-law. But it was Sara Louie Cooke’s bequest that built the second and present church. This Sunday is the one hundred twenty-first anniversary of her death.

FROM THE RECTOR: NEW HEARING

I can’t remember when I first heard of Dom Gregory Dix’s book The Shape of the Liturgy (1945), but I think I knew about it before I went to seminary. I do remember quite well the impression words from this book made on me the day Louis Weil read to my class from Dix’s concluding reflections on the Eucharist—in particular, these words: “He told His friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning ‘for the anamnesis’ of Him, and they have done it always since. Was ever another command so obeyed?” (744).

FROM THE RECTOR: HOW WE SEE

Last week I went to Larchmont to have lunch with Tom Nicoll, rector of Saint John’s Church. He, Doug Fisher—now bishop of Western Massachusetts, formerly rector of Grace Church, Millbrook, and I were the three priests from our diocese attending a 2007 session of a conference sponsored by the Church Pension Fund. Until Doug’s election as bishop last June, the three of us got together for lunch three times a year—once in Larchmont, once in Millbrook and once here in the city. It turned out to be one of our responses to the “Credo Conference.” Tom and I have continued.

FROM THE RECTOR: SUMMER BEGINS

It certainly feels like summer now in New York City. The heat and humidity have arrived and will be with us most days until October. There are many visitors in Times Square—and everywhere really. There’s a lot of construction near the church on both 46th and 47th Streets. The city feels alive right now, not yet tired, lazy from the summer weather.

FROM THE RECTOR: JOHN, PETER AND PAUL

Before the middle of the fourth century, the church in Rome was celebrating the birth of John the Baptist and the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul at the end of June. We know this because a calendar exists for the year 354 for the church in that city (Bradshaw and Johnson, Origins of Feasts [2011] 193-5).

FROM FATHER SMITH: SUMMER SOLSTICE

I moved to Saint Mary’s in January 2007. A few months later I was walking down Sixth Avenue one evening, just before sunset. The sky was very clear. It was really lovely out. I reached 42nd Street and stood at the corner, waiting for the light to change. I happened to glance west, looking towards the Hudson River. I was stunned by what I saw: the sun, a huge red globe, was hanging there just above the horizon, perfectly centered and framed by the skyscrapers lining the avenue, and the sunset’s colors were reflected in the windows of the buildings up and down the avenue.

FROM THE RECTOR: WHAT WAS I THINKING

Thirty years ago I was preparing to be ordained deacon on Saturday, June 11, at the Cathedral of Saint James, Chicago. I had graduated from Nashotah House Seminary a few weeks before. I was getting ready to move to Dallas to begin work at the Church of the Incarnation on Monday, June 27. Over the past few days I’ve been trying to recollect what I was thinking in those days about what my life would be like—and I’ve been chatting about this with Father Jay Smith who was ordained deacon at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on June 10, 1989