Table Talk - Unexpected Saints

Below is the weekly chaplain's newsletter called 'Table Talk' that I write for the Lower School division of Holy Innocents' Episcopal School.

Golden Bears and Parents,

Saints are central figures in the Episcopal tradition. At least once a month in chapel, we sing a favorite hymn called ‘I Sing A Song Of The Saints of God’. One of the lyrics goes:

They lived not only in ages past,

there are hundreds of thousands still.

These words are a great reminder that to find saints we need not look only to the past. A saint is anyone whose life serves as a witness to the love of God, and while it’s true that we encounter saints when we set aside days to celebrate and remember people like St. Francis or Martin Luther King, Jr., our most frequent meetings with saints are those quiet, daily occurances when we find God’s beauty and inspiration shining through the people closest to us.

My lesson in chapel this past week was about how naming the saints around us and identifying the ways they share God’s love makes it easier to find God’s presence and activity in the world. Naming saints is exactly what we’ve been doing in class, and it’s been very inspiring to see how many students recognize moms, dads, siblings, grandparents, classmates, and teachers as saints.

Students are realizing that you don’t have to be perfect to be a saint (we’re human, after all). Instead, the beauty of saints is that the perfect light and love of God gracefully shines through our imperfections. God uses saints to perfect our imperfect lives, and, as the song reminds us:

You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,

In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea;

For the saints of God are just folk like me,

And I mean to be one too.

This week, I pray that you keep your eyes and soul open to the communion of saints that surrounds us.

Don’t be perfect. Just be saintly.

With love and prayers, 

Chaplain Timothy

Eucharist: Including The Excluded

Below is the weekly chaplain's newsletter called 'Table Talk' that I write for the Lower School division of Holy Innocents' Episcopal School.

Dear Golden Bears and Parents,

This semester in chapel, we’ve discovered how people find God’s love and goodness through the arts, through service, through nature, and through songs. While it may strike many as sounding odd, finding God’s love and goodness through fasting and feasting is one of the central themes of Judaism and Christianity. 

Yom Kipper, the Jewish holiday that took place over the weekend, is a period of fasting, repentance, forgiveness, and renewal. Judaism teaches that before renewing your relationship with God, you need to have renewed the relationships with those around you. Jesus stressed this point too, which is not surprising when you consider that he was Jewish. 

Jesus' favorite place to renew relationships was around a table. Hosting meals was among his central ways of showing others God’s love and goodness. This is why you’ll find a table—better known as an ‘altar’—at the front and center of just about any church in the world.

Who Jesus ate with was often surprising and controversial. Like the Hebrew prophets who came before him, Jesus went out of his way to identify with the least, the last, and the lost—the poor, the homeless, the handicapped, the sick, foreigners, prisoners, and all of the people who were regularly excluded from society. Though two millennia have passed, it is simple to think of people who are regularly and unfairly excluded today.

Situated in the prophetic tradition, the Eucharist feast is an important reminder that God is always on the side of those who are bullied and excluded. A renewed relationship with God always requires the elimination of bullying, and inclusion and welcome are peaceful forces that help to end bullying.

When we celebrate Eucharist in chapel each month, we reenact the meal of Jesus so that we can be shaped by the ongoing experience of God’s love and welcome. Eucharist is monthly practice for daily life. It’s meant to let the inclusive Spirit of God guide our actions outside of chapel so that each of us becomes more inclusive and welcoming in our thoughts, words, and deeds.

In the spirit of new and renewed relationships, our Chapel Challenge was to go to a person you see being excluded or bullied—either at recess or during lunch, in the classroom or after school, on the field or at home—and to stand beside that person and invite him or her to spend time with you and be your friend. 

I hope you encourage your children to take part in this challenge by attempting to befriend someone yourself. Kids, after all, often learn best by example.

With Love and Prayers,

Chaplain Timothy

For regular updates, photos, prayers, and glimpses of what's going on in the spiritual life of the school, you’re welcome check out the following:

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Song As Prayer — A Lower School Reflection

Below is the weekly chaplain's newsletter called 'Table Talk' that I write for the Lower School division of Holy Innocents' Episcopal School.

(Student Singing by 1st grader)

Before Thursday, September's chapel theme had been 'ways of praying without words.' Under the inspiration of the paper artist Alice Ball, we explored art as prayer and we learned to pray with our eyes and hands. We also discovered what it means to pray with nature by taking spiritual walks. Using the parable of the Good Samaritan, we discovered that faithfully showing kindness and helping those in need is also a way to pray.

 (5th graders assist in acting out the Good Samaritan during chapel)

In preparation for Rosh Hashanah – the celebration of the Jewish new year—special chapel guest Rabbi Brad Levenberg, our neighbor from Temple Sinai, showed us the tradition of blowing the shofar. A shofar is a horn from a ram or another horned animal. To sound in the new year and wake people up to showing one another God’s goodness and peace, rabbis around the world raise their shofars and make sounds of praise. 

(Rabbi Brad Levenberg of Temple Sinai blows the shofar)

This week, we shifted our attention to using songs as prayer. 

Praising God using music is one of the oldest, most common forms of prayer. During Thursday’s chapel, 1st grader Jay McKown and his teacher, Ms. Betts, helped me retell the story from the book of Acts where the apostles Paul and Silas are beaten and imprisoned for trying to share God’s love in a town that wasn’t interested in hearing good news.

Although they were in pain and in jail, Paul and Silas didn’t blame God for their situation and they didn’t give up, either. To remind themselves of God’s ever-present love and goodness, they began to sing. I asked Jay what song he’d sing in that situation and he began singing ‘Sanctuary’ (a Lower School favorite that we sing each week before reading from scripture). Once he started, rest of the school joined in and sang with him.

Paul and Silas’ song of love was contagious, too, and the other prisoners became a choir. After an unforeseeable turn of events, the earthquake of song ends up melting their jailor’s hopeless heart, and he takes Paul and Silas back to his house where he tends their wounds, shares a meal with them, and, united in God’s love, they become friends.

This week’s Chapel Challenge is to answer these three questions:

What would you have sung if you were Paul or Silas?

Do you have songs that help you recognize God’s love and goodness?

What’s a good song you can share with others to pass on God’s love or to lift them up when they’re feeling lonesome or sad?

If I were Paul or Silas I would have sung ‘I Need You To Survive’, a gospel favorite by Hezekiah Walker. I hear God’s love and goodness in Marvin Gaye’s ‘God Is Love,’ Sufjan Steven’s ‘Impossible Soul,’ Beethoven’s 9^th symphony, ‘Dive’ by Tycho, ‘A Love Supreme’ by Coltrane, ‘Seasons of Love’ from Rent, ‘Boy 1904’ by Jonsi and Alex, ‘Spem in Alium Nanquam Habui’ by the Choir of King’s College, ‘Afterlife’ by Arcade Fire, and countless other songs.

Try sharing your Chapel Challenge answers with your family, your spiritual friends, and/or with me. Listen for God in music and lyrics, and remember the words from Psalm 146 that we say together each week in chapel:

Hallelujah

Praise the Lord, O my soul!

I will praise the Lord as long as I live;

I will sing praises to my God.

With Love and Prayers,

Chaplain Timothy

(More 1st grade art)

P.S.

October is National Bullying Prevention Month, and as we move into a new month we are transitioning from the chapel theme of prayer to that of preventing bullying.

For regular updates, photos, prayers, and glimpses of what's going on in the spiritual life of the school, you’re welcome check out the following:

Facebook:

facebook.com/episcopalschoolchaplain                        

Instagram:

http://instagram.com/episcopalschoolchaplain

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/EpiscopalChap

Art As Prayer — A Lower School Reflection

Below is the weekly chaplain's newsletter called 'Table Talk' that I write for the Lower School division of Holy Innocents' Episcopal School.

Art and faith have always gone hand in hand. This week in chapel, artist and Holy Innocents’ parishioner Mrs. Alice Ball joined us to share how she used the art of origami as a way to pray.

In the aftermath of 9/11, when the United States began its war in Iraq, Mrs. Ball found herself overcome with anger, grief, and an irrepressible desire for peace in a conflicted world. She felt led to pray, but, instead of words paving her path to God, her prayers slowly took flight in the form of origami paper cranes.

(Origami cranes are an international sign of peace made popular by Sadako Sasaki, the young Japanese girl from Hiroshima who was dying of cancer caused by the fallout of the atomic bomb. As a sign of hope, Sadako undertook a major project of folding 1000 peace cranes.)

Mrs. Ball began her prayer for peace without any idea how long it would last. She only knew that she'd continue praying as long as there were US troops on the ground in Iraq. Her origami prayer went on for 3192 days and took her just short of nine years to complete.

In its final form, the prayer is nothing short of breathtaking. All of the students had the chance to view Mrs. Ball’s cranes while they were on display in the small glass chapel at Holy Innocents’. During class, I taught how the artwork's beauty and goodness can be used to help us pray with our eyes.

Mrs. Ball’s art highlights the powerful relationship between prayer and perseverance. "When you begin to pray, you don’t have to know how your prayer is going to end,” said Mrs. Ball. “I began these origami prayers out of anger and frustration, but eventually they took the form of something quite beautiful.”

“What does your prayer look like?” asked Mrs. Ball.

This week, I also invite you to consider what your prayers look like. Think of a time when a work of art has drawn you closer to God. When has a song, movie, meal, poem, piece of architecture, or any other work of art struck you at the level of your soul—the spiritual level that opens you up to unexpected, divine depths of beauty, joy, peace, honesty, compassion, community, understanding, or forgiveness in the world? Talk about your answers with a spiritual friend, share a piece of art with that person, and, if you're willing, try creating an artful prayer yourself.

With Love and Prayers,

Chaplain Timothy

('Origami Crane' by Aidan Ziolo, 1st Grade)