Friday Five: Trips

Posted on March 20, 2014 by janintx

One of the Revgals, Jan, posted this Friday Five:

Last week and this week, I am driving long distances in Texas, first to Houston and today to Austin from Corpus Christi: both times to meet relatives from Canada flying here. This makes me think of trips taken in my life: vacation, moving, visiting relatives, visiting friends, seeking a new home, going away to school, and probably many more.
 For today’s Friday Five, tell about five different trips you have made in your life due to different reasons, modes of travel, or whatever category you choose!
Please link to your post in the comments below. Since I will be traveling, I will check in on your “travels” when I reach my destination.
Happy and safe travels!

1. Mexico:  In the early '70's when I was in my 20's I went to Mexico.  I fell in love with the country and the people.  There was so much color, so much history, such beauty and
   
   so much more to the nation that gave Texas its beginnings than I was teaching in my Texas History classes.  I finally ended up spending some time there doing mission work.  I learned a smattering of Spanish, how to manage outside my own culture and a type of humility that visiting other countries should provide for those who travel, but so often doesn't.  I worked in the states of Morelia and Guerrero. I broke my hip there and that was a trip in itself, but it ended my missionary career.
2.  In 1983 I went to my first General Convention of the Episcopal Church.  I was newly ordained.  J. was in charge of the Women's Caucus booth so we decided to borrow my brother's camper van and drive to Anaheim from TX.  We camped and drove, saw Santa Fe, the Grand Canyon and various other sites along the way.  I loved New Mexico.  I fished the Rio Grand and the King in CA.  We visited the northern part of NM into the mountains near Chalma.  When we were in the Grand Canyon, that night the harvest moon rose up over the canyon.  It was one of the loveliest sights I have ever seen.
3. In 1995, I took sabbatical and went to the UK.  From there a group made the Pilgrimage to Santiago Compostella from Canterbury.  We didn't walk, but did it on a tour bus.  We traveled
   
   to the monastery at Bec, the abbey from which many of the early Archbishops of Canterbury would come.  We visited many cathedrals of the Romanesque period.  We stayed at Silos in Spain where all those Chant records were recorded.  On the way home, J met me in Paris and we drove to Beaunne for the Beaujolais festival and then to Cluny and Taize

1.  In 2009 on Easter morning just after my final service, I got a call from my brother that my
   
   mother was dying.  She was 97 and in an assisted living facility in Fort Worth.  I was living in southern NY state.  Of course over the holiday it was difficult to get flights, but I will always be indebted to American Airlines who was able to get me on a flight on Mon. night.  I got in about 3 am and went straight to the facility.  Mom was in a coma, but I sat on her bed and talked to her for a long while.  I thanked her for waiting for me.  I knew she would hang on as long as I was there so I told her that the whole family was home. Even my eldest niece had come in.  I told her I was going to go home and get some lunch.  By the time I got back to my brother's house, we got the call that she had died.  It was a special trip.  Hard, but holy.  
2. This October, I went back to Mexico for the first time since my youth.  We went with friends who have a sister who lives in Guanajuato.  We spent a week in Mexico City and then a
   
   week and a half in Guanajuato and various other cities.  We were there for the Day of the Dead, a great festival of memorials and family in central Mexico.  We visited the Templo Major which had not even been discovered when I was there in the '70's.  We visited the city where Mexican Independence began.  We attended the Episcopal Church in Mexico City which was wonderful.  They were celebrating the Armistice Day, and most of the English ex-pat community was in attendance.  We were even treated to a Mexican bag pipe band, kilts and all as well as the British Ambassador and various military personages and a number of WWII vets with all their ribbons.  Mexico has grown tremendously in the 40 years I have been gone.  We saw nothing of the 'narco-terrorists' there.  We were safer there than we would have been here in TX. 

Happy Lent

Today we begin Lent, that season in which we as Church recognize how we have fallen short of what we are called to be by God and our Baptismal vows.  These 40 days that we observe are mindful of the 40 days that Jesus spent in the wilderness before he began his ministry.  It is also mindful of the 40 years that Israel spent in the wilderness before coming into the Promised Land.

Forty is a magical number in the Bible.  It really means many, but when applied to days or years, it often has to do with a test.  Noah, Moses, Elijah, all went through 40 days of testing in order to be confident in the faith that resided in them.

The custom of fasting and doing penitence is quite old. It was part of Middle Eastern culture by at least 1500 years before Christ.  It is already a fixed part of the life of the Church by about 150 AD.  The Eastern churches celebrate a longer Lent than we in the West.  The fasting was either an abstinence of certain foods, or a day-long fast like Ramadan depending upon which group of Christianity one belonged.  And it was also the period that those wishing to be baptized prepared for that event at the Vigil of Easter. During the Middle Ages, this practice fell into disuse, but with the changes in the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960’s, this period of preparation for Baptism was re-established.  And many churches today take this period to instruct adult converts to the Faith.

Our readings point us not to fasting, however, but to the test that both Adam and Eve and Jesus must face.  The primal couple is placed in the garden of

God with all things provided for them save one:  They were not to eat of the tree of good and evil—or the tree of knowledge.  All too often we hear stories about the Fall of humanity due to Eve’s actions.  It is interesting that the concept of ‘forever fallen’ does not exist in Judaism.  In Genesis, God has created humanity in God’s likeness—holy and good.  Many Christian traditions claim that Eve’s disobedience brought damnation for humanity for all time, but that is a belief system that develops much later in Christianity. 

I prefer to understand the story of Adam and Eve (and remember, you guys, that Adam was there all along) is a matter of trying to usurp the power of God.  Satan entices them not merely to eat fruit.  But to aspire to divine knowledge, to depend upon themselves rather than the Creator that had molded them from the dust.  What Adam and Eve succumb to goes beyond their humanity.  They aspire to equality with God.  And when we think about it, most of our own sinfulness is rooted in the desire to go it alone, or to ignore the Holy in our lives.

Paralleled with the story is the temptation of Jesus.  This story is different from the beginning:  Following Jesus’ baptism in the Gospel of Matthew, the Spirit

leads him into the wilderness.  And after fasting, Jesus is confronted by an Accuser or a Tester. That is how the word Satan translates in Hebrew. Like any good rabbi, he had to undergo his ordination exams.  The tests are on very basic human desires:  Food, Safety and Power.   Satan quotes the prophets and the psalms.  But Jesus responds to each of the tests with a quote from Torah—the Law.  And they are all from the part of Deuteronomy that reminds the people of Israel how they are to live after their 40 years in the desert and while entering the Promised Land.

Jesus does not respond to the devil with his divine power.  He manifests his faith in God from his own humanity.  He speaks from the knowledge that any good Jew would know—what it means to be a good man, a good person.  Jesus models, not a superhuman faith;  he shows each of us that when we know Who runs the universe, we don’t have to resort to God-like knowledge or even God-like power.  He signs for us that we can depend upon a holy faith because it is given by God.

Temptation is not a sign of weakness.  It is part of life.  What we do with it, is

our responsibility.  We all hunger after food, safety and power.  But if we have walked with God, if we have come into the presence of the Holy One in our lives, we know Truth when we hear it.  We know of goodness when we see it.  We know how to depend upon God in the face of temptation.  That is what Jesus models for us in this passage.

But though we KNOW the difference between good and evil, we don’t always rely on God’s power to avoid the evil.  We participate in it.  And sometimes we participate in it without doing anything at all.  Adam and Eve strove to become God.  Jesus, who was God, strove to be human.  At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, Jesus understood his place in the Universe;  his work was to show us God. 

Lent is the time when we can touch our own divinity and our own humanity in the wildernesses of our lives.  We have survived the winter.  The hope of a new season is upon us.  But there is a greater hope for all of us:  It is the hope that we can change.  No matter how young or how old, we are called to that transformation to live truly into the life of Christ.  

Lent is the time when we can practice, with the help of others, to be just a bit more than we were.  As a community of faith we all know our sinfulness.  In

Lent we don’t have to pretend that we are sinless.  We come together as Church, as community, as family—all looking for the holiness to which we have been called.  We walk this journey with Christ together, all knowing that our issues are different, but our efforts are much the same.  It is a time to reconcile, to remember, to offer, to embrace in the name of Jesus.  Not for ourselves—not that we individually might become holier, But that we might create a better world. 

All too often Christianity becomes a personal religion.  It becomes a Jesus-and-me type of thing.  For me, that isn’t faith; that is just self-improvement. Jesus invites people to live together in harmony, in Shalom.  His message was to bring God into that incredibly complex thing called community.  And while we can only change ourselves, the change in each and every one of us changes the whole.  That is why Lent is important.  We are about changing the world during Lent.  We are about our own transformation, but that transformation changes us all.  Lent is the time when we are conscious that those changes are about loving one another. 

 So I invite you to these weeks of transformation as a way to change yourself, to change your family, the parish, the Church, as a way to change the world in the name of the God who loves us more than life.  AMEN