Reflections
Dear Parishioners and Friends of St. John’s,
Do you ever have those occasions when you wonder whose side God is on? Even clergy occasionally ask such a question.
On the Monday before Christmas Eve, the electrician came to St John’s to make a minor repair with a fuse box in the electrical room, but it did entail turning off the power for the entire building. Originally, he had planned to come in the spring, but his boss decided that the repair really should be made sooner to avoid any possibility of more issues. All was fine, even though it did mean I had to be at the church at 6 AM to let him in. With the Warming Center open at night, and the Mission during the day, there is only a small window of time to turn the power off. It all happened as planned and without incident.
Then I happily returned to my office to continue working on my Christmas sermon. Only, as I tried to start my computer, it got so far and then nothing happened. 'Unable to find hard drive' repeatedly flashed on the screen. I have no idea what the difference is between a hard drive or software, but I realized after several failed attempts this was not good! I phoned a friend to ask what it meant when it said it could not find my hard drive. He was not completely sure either, but said it was not good news!
Off I jumped with the computer to the repair store, which is conveniently just two blocks from the church. The next day, the shop phoned with the news that the technician had only seen one other computer as badly damaged as mine!
Several months previously, the office Parish computer had also died. We had not replaced it yet, but after waiting until year end, we did order a new one which was sitting in the office ready to be set up. This meant we were down to one machine for the office, which we try to limit to use of accounting purposes only. "Well", I said, "can you retrieve anything from it"? A flat "no" was the reply.
O dear! Gone was my Christmas sermon, indeed gone were my sermons from the last 15 years! Gone was everything from the last 15 years! I tried to restrain my hysteria with difficulty. "All gone", I said! Well, hopefully not gone, just inaccessible. Perhaps I could go to a specialist and see what he can do. But it was close to Christmas, so almost everything was closing. l did rewrite my Christmas sermon and survived into the new year. The hard drive is now with someone who, in the next week or so, will tell me if he can extract any of my precious information. "You had it backed up you will say"? Well, the ugly truth is no. I thought it was, and indeed I even had files in a 'cloud' (if you don’t know what a cloud is, you are better for it). Well, my files in a cloud are there, but nothing was in them (typical of me, you might say).
I had planned a week away after Christmas and Epiphany when the Bishop came on relatively short notice. No bishop, no computer files, just a happy Rector was I. I needed a break. Off to New York City I went. It was a marvelous time away. I had never been to The Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval collection at the north end of Manhattan (photo below). It was built like a monastery, with bits of pieces of several European ones donated by J. D. Rockefeller in the 1930s. It is incredibly beautiful and full of the most moving pieces of mostly Christian art in a park setting which is appealing even in January.
I also visited St. John the Divine, the Episcopal cathedral of New York City. It is still not yet completed, but it is still one of the largest, if not the largest in the world. New York Episcopalians sure had ambition!
On Sunday, I visited St. Ignatius of Antioch which is a delightful Anglo-Catholic parish, which is very much in our tradition (Rite 1, traditional language, eastward facing, humeral veils, High Mass, etc.), on the upper west side. Its Rector was a classmate of the late Mother Ellen Aitken. He too was having his Christmas/Epiphany troubles. A radiator had broken in the adjacent Parish House, and it flooded parts of it and the wall of the church it shared. We commiserated over church plumbing, and that no one told us about this in seminary!
Later in the morning, I went to the Solemn Mass at St. Mary the Virgin, Times Square (photo above). I had been to St. Mary’s before some 15 or 20 years ago. I entered, and I observed the sanctuary very brightly lit, but the nave of the church in darkness. This was a shame because I was trying to admire the statues of the Apostles which are on the columns in the nave. But I thought the lights will come on shortly as it was almost 11 AM. Just before then, the Rector came out to apologize to the congregation. He had been away the past week, and St. Mary’s had just begun to install a new lighting system. For some reason, the workers had left on Friday without making sure the lights in the nave actually functioned, so we were in the dark for the entire Mass! I was beginning to fear at this rate what I might find when I returned to St John’s. Still, it was a beautiful Service, but it was rather difficult to follow the bulletin, unless you had a flashlight!
All to say that - yes, all of us get hit with challenges both large and small at different times in our lives. Our faith is not a talisman against unpleasant things happening to us. But how we confront and deal with these situations can, and are mediated by our faith in a good and generous Creator.
By the way, did I mention my cell phone is now malfunctioning?!
Your technically challenged Rector,
Keith +
