"‘Twas a Strange Night in Advent”

9 December 2012

The Second Sunday of Advent

Kent School

St. Joseph’s Chapel

If you listen closely to the readings of this Advent season, the results can be strange and jarring.  The comfortable expectations of this sentimental season—especially during these last few days before our long awaited vacation--come up against the hard edges of the Advent discipline on this second Sunday.  The figure of John the Baptist in today’s gospel is provocative, and unsettling.  The tight tension, or seeming contradiction, of Advent warnings or doom and expectations of Christmas cheer, is at its most dramatic in John the Baptist, who comes to us with prophecies of judgment if we don’t wake up to how we are living our lives.

God is coming, John the Baptist warns us, but what will that mean?  Will God’s wrath or God’s Love come among us as our guest this year?  Unlike the Christmas story itself, the lessons for Advent are edgy and dark.  John the Baptist lived in the wilderness, and people came to him, including Jesus, to hear his prophetic voice.  The tame moments when we approach the Christ child radically contrast with the Advent voices of our tradition that call us to account, and repentance; we are not ready for, nor are we worthy of, the love of God, so we are told by John. 

So, John the Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness, won’t let us be free, awash in the warm glow of Christmas.  It says in today’s gospel from Luke that the word of God came to John, but it’s not a very nice word if we read Luke past the lesson assigned this morning.  Here’s John the Baptist just a few verses later in Luke:

“You brood of vipers!  (Vipers are snakes by the way).  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bear fruits worthy of repentance…Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees.”

             

So today, on this last Sunday before the break, I will tell you a story from my past, from long ago; a story that is both funny and sad, tragic and comic.  My own prophetic ministry, as a satirical John the Baptist, was a personal failure.  But I survived, just barely, to tell you the tale.  To make a long story just a little shorter, I once stole a Christmas tree.  I will have to take you back to my first year of divinity school at the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan, to a time before you were born.  At General Seminary, there is always an historic reading of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” with all of the children from the seminary and the neighborhood gathered around the massive fireplace in the common area.  A favorite reader of the story was the then Governor of New York Mario Cuomo.  His son Andrew is the current governor of New York.  However, my own controversial ministry to General Seminary was more along the lines of the morality play “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.”  I was the Grinch.

It all began so simply on a December day of cold and wintry Advent gloom.  It was then that I first noticed the early appearance, the premature arrival that is, of a Christmas tree on the afternoon of December 6^th, 1989.  Ah, the Christmas tree; this is a tradition which has no scriptural support, or theological justification, or religious meaning whatsoever.  The Christmas tree is actually Pagan in its origins.  The tree in question was set up in the exact middle of the Oxford style Close of General Seminary in Manhattan. The children had decorated the tree to celebrate St. Nicholas Day on December 6th.  I hadn’t known that last fact when I first began plotting the Pagan tree’s downfall, but it wouldn’t have stopped me.  I was young and impetuous, and full of brio.  “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees,” says John the Baptist, after all. 

But here’s the problem; technically, religiously speaking, the tree, which has—let me repeat—no religious meaning, should not make an appearance until December 24^th, the beginning of the Christmas season, after Advent is over.  The tree should stand for the twelve days of Christmas, and then go down at Epiphany.  If you’re going to be technical, which I certainly was.  My theft was during finals week, judgment season as the Baptist once warned us; and a plan was instantly hatched in my stressed out, homework-addled brain.  I tried, unsuccessfully, to focus on my upcoming Koine Greek exam, but a Grinch, not a scholar, was lurking in the shadows of General Seminary.

I wasn’t planning to steal the tree, not exactly, just to move it, under the veneer of satire and the cover of darkness.  Due to the great size of the tree, I needed some help; a few disciples if you will.  So I shared my Advent plan for a commando strike with two of my classmates, who are now both priests, here in the Northeast.  We went into holy Advent motion in the first hour of 7 December, a day that still lives in infamy at General Seminary.  They still tell the story to their children.  We Advent guardians were clad in black cassock (robes like the vergers); our visages were darkened with face paint—just three ghosts of the seminary tidying things up to insure a pure Advent.  As I said, the season of Christmas begins on December 24^th, and not a minute before. 

The tree was coming down. 

Strange church mischief was in the midnight air.   

We three, we merry Advent Police, left a lovely sign in purple calligraphy where the tree had been raised the day before.  Our calling card sign boldly read: “Beware you secular n’er do wells!  The Advent Police.”  Naturally, naturally, I chose the Dean of General Seminary as the honorary commander of the Advent Police.  We moved the tree into his office (the next day breaking and entering was among the charges against me).  The dean’s office was far too small for the enormous Christmas tree.  Even placed at an angle, it was still bent at the top by the ceiling, forming an upside down L shape.  The angel was set sideways by our mad midnight work; but the tree still looked very pretty, quite special, when we turned on the Christmas lights in the dark office.  Surely we had laid the groundwork for a lovely day at the helm for the veteran dean.  Good morning, sir.  It is more blessed to give than to receive.  A letter of introduction from the mysterious and apocalyptic Advent Police was waiting for the good priest on his desk.  What a glorious night it was.  We even rang the bell in the seminary tower to celebrate the holy Advent that was upon all the sleeping Whos in Whoville. 

Or something like that.

  

But my Advent adventure, or misadventure, became my very own painful Christmas lesson by the next morning. 

I learned, so much, by the very next day.

Here are the lessons I learned:

1)  I discovered, very quickly, that one person’s satire is, sometimes, another person’s disciplinary investigation.  And it’s not very fun to be the subject of a disciplinary investigation when you’re supposed to be in graduate school.  It is also better to confess when everything points to you.  The assistant dean came to my dorm room before breakfast to ask me a few questions about my whereabouts on the previous night. 

How did they know it was me?  How?  I ask you.    

2)  A dean, however stern and foreboding, can be a very kind and compassionate figure of authority at the same time, especially when you’re in trouble.  It often doesn’t feel like it at the time—only when you look back years later.  The dean put me on probation, even though some members of the faculty wanted the perpetrators expelled.  Yes, I was now a perp.  Breaking and entering takes you from the school handbook to the police station apparently, even during Advent.  

3)  I’m not as funny as I think I am.  And neither are you.  I learned that a good idea in the middle of the night can be a very bad idea by 9 AM the next morning.  Let me say this again: a good idea in the middle of the night can be a very bad one by morning.   

4)  The most important.  One person’s familiar holiday can be a small child’s very first Christmas, or the first time decorating a tree.  Think of the magic of your first real snowfall, or the first time hearing the story of the birth of Jesus, or hearing the rich beauty of the Lessons and Carols service on Wednesday.  It’s always somebody’s first time.  Or this year could be the first time a person you know really feels the true spirit of this season, a time of giving not just receiving.  And it can also be a loved one’s last Christmas.  Near the end of your life, I have no doubt that sharing a Christmas with your family is a foretaste of heaven itself.

It was through my failure as a Christmas Grinch that I learned the important lesson of this season.  Though John the Baptist was right about many things, he was also deeply, terribly wrong, in a sense—but an important one--about the most significant thing of all: Ours is not a God of doom, but rather a God of grace, love, forgiveness, and unspeakable beauty.  A God who makes each of us a beginner when it comes to experiencing, and sharing, the mystery of Love.  To be a child of God is to live in wonder; to find the mystical in the ordinary, and the ordinary in the mystical.  In God’s mercy, in those terrifying depths of divine love too bright for our mortal eyes to gaze upon, we were and are not condemned by God. 

Something different and unexpected happened. 

God instead gave us Jesus Christ; and God gave us each other. 

The Christian writer and Oxford professor C.S. Lewis once described the infinite grace of God with these words: “The hardness of God is better than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”  

The hardness of God is better than the softness of men. 

God gave, and still gives, everything to win our hearts, and to save our souls, that we too may give freely to each other and to our world as we have received God’s love and mercy.  Love is not simply what we expected, or what we needed; it is more than we can possibly imagine.  The only gift we can give back to God is the very best of who we are: to live again the good life of compassion, forgiveness, and charity to one another, in word and deed; that God may no longer be a stranger in the world, and in our hearts.  Have a blessed Advent and a merry Christmas and a happy Hanukkah.  May God bless all of you, and your families, in the weeks to come. 

“Advent Marks in Time: God in the Here and Now”

2 December 2012

The First Sunday of Advent

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

I’d like to begin this sermon exactly where Rachel Choe ended the meditation chapel on Thursday evening.  She was pondering the way we live our lives.  What exactly are we rushing off to?  Why are we in such a hurry to be out of high school?  Or college?  When exactly is this golden time that we seem to be expecting, just around the next corner?  At our formal dinners, we often hear how many days there are left for seniors.  If we lived our lives correctly, I think the seniors would be sad, and the third form would be overjoyed to hear about the plentiful days until graduation.  This is a special time of year, but we do it all wrong.  We even have a name for the madness: the Christmas rush.  At the meditation chapel, an alternative was presented: to be, simply and deeply, present in the moment. 

There is a wonderful book about the power and potential that is in the moment called The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.  This short passage is about the mystery of our being that can be found when we stop rushing past our lives, at Christmas or any time. 

            “Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.  However, Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence.  This means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature.  But don’t seek to grasp it with your mind.  Don’t try to understand it.  You can only know it when your mind is still.  When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.  To regain awareness of Being and to abide in the state of ‘feeling-realization’ is enlightenment.”

            Three years ago, I was giving the opening prayer, the benediction, at a dinner for my high school class in Turlock, California.  The Turlock Bulldogs, it was a lifetime ago.  The occasion for the dinner was our twenty-fifth year since our graduation.  Looking around the room, I reflected on how we were all in a hurry to grow up.  Why were we like that?  Most of us would give quite a lot, maybe everything, to go backward in time; to simply be in the moment as the Christmas break was approaching in the magical time of our youth, now gone.   Maybe, just maybe, I said, we could slow down tonight—and be completely present in the moment.  If we did that, if we could find a way, we would be more than young again.  Somehow I think that’s what God is all about, though I don’t think that’s the word we would use: to describe the wonder of just being.   

In 2010, a documentary about education came out called The Race to Nowhere, directed by Vicki Abeles.  She came up with the idea for the documentary as she watched her high achieving daughter actually become physically sick from academic pressure.  This movie is about highly motivated kids who are deeply unhappy, even when they get the results, like the right college admission, that they’re looking for.  These are not the slackers.  The documentary explores the lives and values of teenagers who want to be the very best, but the psychological cost of their striving is presented in this thoughtful and compassionate movie.  Whether you are a high honors student or not, you are all responding to pressure, be it academic, athletic, social, or extracurricular.  And the toxic cocktail of all of these things is the idea that your college admissions, or rejections, are your measurement of worth as a human being.  Why are we racing off to nowhere?  Human beings are crazy.  Animals actually don’t have neuroses.  Unless they live with people.  Then they start to get a little crazy.        

I have compassion for all of you racing off to nowhere: because I was once an insane little hamster on the crazy wheel myself.  I wasn’t always the Zen master of meditative basketball and sacred hoops.  Twenty-eight years ago, I was the valedictorian in my class, out of some five hundred students.  Now I’m in recovery, I go to meetings.  Being the valedictorian was something I decided to be; it didn’t just happen.  I didn’t have the same problem with athletics because I never played, or rarely played when the game was already decided.  Those coaches are all going to hell, by the way.  I’d be sent in with eighteen seconds left to play, so I tried to shoot as many times as possible before the horn sounded.  But, every night, I studied like a demon, with an agenda.  I had two objectives: one was to be the very best, to be #1.  The second was my holy grail, my golden dream: to go to West Point. 

Then a terrible thing happened: I got everything I ever wanted.  I won the race to nowhere.  Now West Point is a wonderful place if you like military perfection, people screaming at you, marching all the time, firing automatic weapons, and the possibility of live combat (whether or not you agree with American foreign policy).  Aside from being unable to take orders, smirking when people yelled at me, and hating regimentation, I loved it at West Point.  The uniforms were fantastic, and great with the ladies.  But I also had a very important and terrible realization.  I wasn’t there for me; I was there for my father.  I was living his dream, not mine, and I wasn’t going to get any closer to him by doing it.  I wasn’t going to get the love I wanted by following his dream.  So I did something that was very painful—is painful to this very day, though it’s a deep and good pain because it came with self discovery.  My great decision: I dropped out of West Point, and the race to nowhere.  I went in search of my authentic self.  Oh, and by the way, nobody at the twenty-five year reunion seemed to remember, or care, that I was the valedictorian, or that I dropped out of West Point.  I felt exactly the same way.

When my dream of being a West Point graduate and an army officer died, a new dream was born—almost instantaneously.  It is often when you fail that you find the true terms of your success.  That new dream, a new story, would lead me to divinity school and the priesthood; and eventually to you, my home at Kent on the other side of the country from California, and not very far from West Point, the citadel of my lost childhood.  In my first year of divinity school, the dean of my seminary told us something strange and mysterious.  He said we should make all of our study into a form of prayer.  To make all of our study into a prayer.  This idea was the exact opposite of my pre-West Point self.  Everything then was an insane competition where a bad grade (like an A-) was an indication of my worth as a human being. 

Make your study into a form of prayer. 

How can you do this?  Well, here’s a place to start in your thinking.  During my first year at Kent, a young man named Jon Geller was diagnosed with bone cancer.  He played center for Coach Marble on a team that eventually won the New England Championship.  But football was over for Jon in preseason; when his cancer was discovered after he broke his shoulder during practice.  Jon had to leave Kent to take a medical leave for chemotherapy treatments at home in Montreal.  Jon wasn’t facing college admissions stress anymore, or the nose guard across the line.  He was facing the ultimate test that we will all face.  And the gritty, determined young man fought his cancer, with every fiber of his being.  This is a happy story because Jon went into remission.  He returned to Kent; not to be a football player, but to be a student.  To be a human being.  To just be.  In the spring of his senior year, before graduation, Jon spoke in chapel about his journey, back to life as we know it.  I can remember every word.  You could have heard a pin drop in this chapel.  At the end of his chapel talk, he gave two Thanksgivings to God.  The first will surprise you.  Jon said he was grateful for being able to do homework again.  To read, to write, to think, to do math problems, to draw, to understand the world around him.  Jon had learned how to make studying into a form of prayer.  His second Thanksgiving was for friendship.  You never know how important your friends are until your life is on the line.  Being a friend is one of the most important human vocations.  Be kind to each other. 

Make your life into a prayer of gratitude, completely in the moment.  People will notice something different about you, almost instantly, a change in the air, a wonderful disturbance in the force.  This is called peace of mind, the change that comes over you when your authentic self is born.  It is God incarnate, but you probably won’t even need to use that word.  Being will be enough.   

There is a Christmas movie that many of you have seen called Love Actually.  How many of you have seen it?  My wife loves it.  We watched it again last night.  I pretend to hate it, because it’s pretty cheesy at times, but I secretly don’t.  “I feel it in my fingers.  I feel it in my toes.”  The opening voice over is by Hugh Grant, while watching people at Heathrow Airport, as family and friends unite after flights from all over the world.  In his words, Grant speaks of the phone calls on September 11^th , by people on the airplanes.  People who knew that they were going to die made the last phone call of their lives.  They didn’t talk about colleges, or work, or wealth.  They were calls of love to family members, words that live forever.  The conversations were the last words of love, from the deepest place of our being.  It was Love actualized. 

Beyond even approaching your studies with a new heart, make your entire life into a form of prayer.  A prayer of gratitude.                     

            I don’t often wait until the last paragraph to address the gospel.  But here we are at the end.  I think it takes a while to really see this gospel, to wake up to it.  Jesus speaks about the powerful signs coming in the future that will reveal the presence of God in our world.  These lessons are often associated with the second coming of Jesus Christ.  They are read during the season of Advent which is considered a time of watching and waiting.  But if Advent is simply about watching and waiting, we’ll probably miss the miracle, even if it’s right in front of our eyes.  When Advent waiting shifts to simply being, the second coming is in the here and now.  It is.  Don’t miss the magic of the next week and a half by merely counting down the days until you race off to nowhere.  Stop, sit, rest, be, and love actually.  It will make your life rich beyond words.  It’s all around us; as the God of Love, the child of our Being, is born again, and again, in poor hearts like ours. 

“The Gospel of the Bullpen”

16 October 2012

Chapel Talk

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

            This is the first of two baseball chapel talks this week.  Dr. Green from the Science Department is taking the mound on Thursday, and I’m taking the hill for the opener this morning.  

One of the most frequent messages in chapel talks at Kent School is the advice to take advantage of your opportunities.  Take advantage of all your opportunities.  I have heard this encouragement offered in St. Joseph’s Chapel countless times, by both students and faculty members.  The lesson has never gotten old; it is something like the gospel of Kent School.  When you arrive at Kent, a window of possibility opens.  It seems like the window will be open for a long time, but the days and weeks and months and years of a high school career come very fast.  A first indicator has come and gone.  You have a limited amount of time to make choices about how to respond to this open window in your life, and what you will become is predicated on the choices you make.  There are so many forms of regret—academic, athletic, social—that can come with these choices.  I have learned at this stage in my own life that I don’t get to follow all of my dreams; I have to choose.  I don’t have forever on this planet. 

            As I reflected on what it means to follow your dreams—and what it means to choose your dreams, I thought about my experience as a minor league baseball chaplain.  I was the chaplain of a team called the Ogden Raptors (named during your dinosaur phase) which played in Ogden, Utah, as a member of the Pioneer League.  I did this for two seasons, in 1994 and 1995, and it was a unique experience--one that allowed me to collect so many stories—to pluck stories like grapes, few of which I can share in chapel this morning.  It is sometimes said that someone who often uses profanity “swears like a sailor.”  Or a longshoreman, if you know any.  But I am here to correct these comparisons and similes: Sailors and longshoremen instead swear like ballplayers.  I have never heard more profanity in my life, not to mention the disturbing, demented, immature, profane, and sometimes hilarious discussions about everything under the sun—ranging philosophical discussions that took place on the bus, in the locker room, during batting practice, and even during the game as well.  In baseball, the chatter never stops; from the inane to the sublime to the philosophical to the anatomical, and around the bases we go again.  I went on two road trips with the Raptors, and I’ll never be the same, like a sailor after he first crosses the equator.  I was like an anthropologist, like Margaret Mead, or rather like Indiana Jones, studying primitive culture.  And I was grateful for the stories I got to collect, like souvenir baseballs in batting practice—they were scuffed and beautiful prizes. 

            So what can I share in chapel about my experience as a minor league baseball chaplain?  I can share the lesson about the courage it takes to follow your lifelong dreams, all the way to the end; how to persevere in the face of adversity, and how to keep going when no one else believes in you.  Every minor league baseball player has the dream of being a major league baseball player.  Minor league players are working hard to get by financially, playing for love more than anything, and a last chance at a dream. 

The Ogden Raptors played in single A baseball, but the Raptors were, then, an independent team.  They had no affiliation with a major league club; they are now with the Arizona Diamondbacks.  Most of the Raptor players had never been drafted, and the majority of them were former college players short on talent, but big on dreams; it was the proud domain of the underdog.  The players followed their dreams out in the open; they were willing to fail out in the open.  Baseball is a game that makes you tougher with failure, because failure is normal.  If you fail 70% of the time as a hitter, you’re doing very well; you’re hitting .300.  Getting rid of your fear of failure for many of you is the greatest obstacle.  And if you haven’t failed at anything, you haven’t tried anything very hard.  Most of the players on the Ogden club were playing the last year of baseball in their lives.  

One of my jobs as the chaplain for the Ogden Raptors was preaching a sermon for the home and visiting teams before Sunday evening games.  These baseball chapels took place in the bullpen.  Preaching in the bullpen.  Was this the high point of my career or the descent into hell, the inferno of Dante?  Actually I found it very poetic, heavenly, warming up with words in the bullpen, back and forth like a game of catch.  One of these sermons was documented in the poorly selling non-fiction book Minor Players, Major Dreams, by Brett Mandel.  In the book, Mr. Mandel, who clearly needed a fact checker (or a pair of eyes), said I was wearing Birkenstock sandals while preaching.  Just because I’m from California doesn’t mean that I own a pair of Birkenstocks.  And even if I did, which I don’t, I wouldn’t wear them to a ballgame.  It was pure libel.  I did the Christian thing.  I forgave him, but it was difficult.   

But I loved preaching in the bullpen, which is why I was delighted recently to find a book called The Bullpen Gospels, by Dirk Hayhurst, a long time minor league player who was just about ready to quit baseball.  He had made it as high as AAA for a few weeks, but he begins the season of the book in A ball, a huge disappointment.  He is ready to hang ‘em up.  The state of his dreams is seemingly watched by the Grim Reaper; his dreams are about to die.  From The Bullpen Gospels. 

“It’s hard to pitch with fear.  It was as if baseball’s Grim Reaper was watching every time I took the mound.  Most of the time he’d show up in little incarnations, like a black cat or a double that landed exactly on the foul line just when I thought I was going to have a clean outing.  Lately though, it seemed as if the Baseball Reaper had season tickets for the front row to every park I played in.’

‘Other guys began to see the Grim Reaper as well.  Haunted and paranoid, we strugglers took refuge in the rear of the bullpen discussing what we’d do after being released.  I told everyone I was going to join the circus because it’d remind me of life in the minors.  Another guy said he was going to become an executioner because at least he’d feel like he was getting even.”

 But Dirk doesn’t quit.  He doesn’t quit because of his family.  His family is far from perfect; they are terribly unhappy.  Dirk’s father can barely walk after falling off the roof in an accident, and Dirk was the one who found him.  It’s a miracle that his father can even walk, but he has no feeling in his hands and feet.  His father suffers from serious depression, and he has been fired from his most recent job.  Dirk’s mother works the graveyard shift to pay the bills.  His brother is an alcoholic who lives at home with the two unhappy parents.  When drunk, he regularly beats up his mother and father.  When Dirk intervenes, his brother beats up Dirk instead.  Dirk fears that his brother will kill one of them someday.  When Dirk calls the police during one horrific night, his parents are angry at him.  So Dirk tries to funnel his own anger and frustration into baseball.  He tries to change his family with his athletic success, but it’s an impossible makeover, an elusive alchemy.  Why is he even trying?              

There are many wonderful stories in The Bullpen Gospels.  You get to collect them when you chase a great dream.  Two of the most moving stories involve a homeless man and a severely disabled boy in a wheelchair that Dirk seeks out after a ballgame.  Dirk volunteers at a homeless shelter, and he ends up trading his shoes with a homeless man who lost all his money because of his wife’s medical bills.  His wife ended up dying anyway.  It’s a powerful encounter, one that gives Dirk healing and hope.  In the other story, the boy at the ballpark is so incapacitated; he can’t even accept the simple baseball that Dirk is offering him.  The two stories remind Hayhurst of how hard it is to give and receive love in his own family.  But the gospel of the bullpen begins to be born in just these moments; as Dirk’s dreams start to include other people.  They become about more than just about himself, and making the major leagues (he does make it by the way…for the Toronto Blue Jays, briefly).  But the absolute hardest thing he has to do all season is forgive his brother who begins to put his life back together in rehabilitation and AA meetings.  It is not easy to forgive him.  Dirk also lets go of failure; failure is no longer the measurement of his worth as a person. We’re so much more than that as human beings, and what we overcome is more important than what we achieve.  Dirk begins to pitch without fear, and he accepts the final results because he is giving his very best, without any fear at all.  When he lets go of his fear of failure, anything is possible.  He is finally at peace, no matter the results.  That’s a powerful feeling.     

The window of opportunity is open now for this year in your life; and a new indicator is here with the baseball playoffs underway, and my beloved San Francisco Giants still in the autumn hunt.  I love Buster Posey, but who doesn’t?  How we respond to our opportunities is more than how we honor our gifts, talents, and abilities.  It is how we honor God, and how we honor each other as children of God, as the human family.  When this year began, many of you felt like strangers to each other.  Now you know you’re not alone.  You are making friends for life.  No one will replace them, just like your own brothers and sisters (and dog).  Find and follow your own dreams.  But don’t be surprised if you start to dream dreams for other people, and to help those around you in your life find their true path.  With love, with faith, and without fear.               

“The Mountaintop and The Level Place of Wisdom”

Opening Service for Faculty

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

4 September 2012

I, like many of you, experience a profound and unsettling awakening to every new school year.  It’s not very pretty, this personal preparation, and every end of summer is slightly different.  I certainly won’t bore you tonight with some of the more neurotic elements, especially the truly bizarre school dreams that come to me as the days of August peel off the calendar.  It is a strange time of reentry where feelings of inadequacy are normal, even though I’ve been doing this for a while.  It’s just that I really know what I’m getting myself into.  I think it was easier when I didn’t.  This doesn’t mean that there isn’t hope and beauty and idealism in my reentry to my vocation as an educator.  There is.  It’s just all wrapped up together.    

This summer I watched the inner battle as a dialogue, or argument, specifically between idealism and realism.  My inner dialogue is usually not so well-defined, philosophically.  For instance, the founder of Kent School, Father Frederick Herbert Sill, wanted the boys of Kent to experience the monastic ideal of spiritual discipline and contemplation.  For much of its history, Kent had chapel eight times a week, sometimes as early as 6 AM, including on the girls’ campus beginning in 1960.  As chaplain, I am responsible for exposing students to the Transcendent, the Otherness of the holy, ancient mysticism, the Bible and Jesus, ethical teaching and how to choose the good, and, well, let’s call it the existence of God.  Wow, that’s amazing.  The reality is that we are teaching teenage students who are, actually, addicted to their i-phones, who expect instant gratification, and are totally saturated with technology and social media in a culture that is much less religiously defined.  Despite the beauty of St. Joseph’s Chapel, this is not a home field advantage.      

Idealism and realism.  Father Sill wanted the boys of Kent to retreat from the world, in a way that mixed Sparta with the rule of St. Benedict, the result being something called muscular Christianity, if you can imagine that (of course, this condition had nothing to do with girls).  I learned from Jesse Klingebiel’s chapel talk last year that Father Sill purchased the land for his ideal experiment very cheaply here because the iron industry had devastated the environment of Northwest Connecticut.  The ideal and the real do strange dances together.  When I first arrived at Kent eight years ago, the monastic ideal was dramatically more present because there were no cell phones.  The students had them, but they were useless, wonderfully useless.  Kent, Connecticut, did not have a cell tower then.  If I were an anarchist priest, I know the first thing I would do.  If I were Don Quixote, I know where I would find my first windmill.         

            During a Theology class last spring, my students were responding to the themes of realism and idealism in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors.  Terrible people did wonderfully in life, and the idealists were the sore losers in the end, with incomplete philosophies and broken dreams.  Also, the realist got the girl.  Yet the realists of the film were not worthy of emulation; they weren’t remotely heroic.  During our discussion, a student brought up the question of who are the realists, and who are the idealists, among the Kent faculty.  I took a step back and waited for the fascinating discussion that was about to flow.  This was going to be interesting.  Who are the realists among us?  It’s going to be the Math Department, right?  But they’re always in chapel, very idealistic.  Not the Science Department, they’re too ecological.  Maybe someone from the History Department, possibly Mr. Ober, a faculty member with realpolitik foreign policy.  Instead the students were completely stumped.  We had a long but thoughtful silence.  Don’t be afraid of those in class.  They were interested--they understood the terms of the question, but they could not proceed.  Until John Dong explained the problem this way: “Think about it.  You’re all teachers.  That means that you’re all the idealists.  We’re the realists, the students.”  

With John Dong’s explanation in mind, I did something new as I prepared for the new year; as I prepared for tonight.  I did something very idealistic.  I started making trips to the Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York.  The founder of this school was a priest and a monk in the Order of the Holy Cross, where they still pray five times a day.  So I went looking for Father Sill.  I really didn’t need to, realistically, since he’s buried right outside my window—he and I have some interesting talks.  The Holy Cross Monastery is only 42 minutes away by GPS, and I have made cell phone calls from the monastery grounds, so I might be more of a realist than you thought when I began this sermon. 

As the idealist and the realist in me bickered over the last weeks of August, I came across a book whose title shut up both of them: The Pope Who Quit.  Subtitled, A True Tale of Mystery Death, and Salvation, by Jon M. Sweeney.  In the two thousand year history of the Church, there has been only one pope who quit—just quit, who simply walked away from the job after only fifteen weeks.  The man was Pope Celestine V, formerly Peter Morrone, or Peter the Hermit, and he didn’t want the job in the first place.  The people who knew him found him to be holy, courageous, simple-minded, naïve, physically powerful, spiritual, out of touch, and saintly.  The truth is that Peter was a lot like Jesus, and he found God more in nature rather than in conventional church buildings.  Today we would certainly call him an introvert.  His time as pope is a little like the movie Being There with Peter Sellers.  Or there is the recent Italian movie from 2011 called We Have a Pope, about the election of an unlikely spiritual cardinal as the new pope.  The newly elected pontiff begins to suffer panic attacks, and a full-time therapist is brought in to bring the reluctant pope to his throne despite his fears, anxiety, and overwhelming sense of inadequacy. 

But the story of The Pope Who Quit is an unbelievable true story.  When Peter Morrone was elected pope in 1294, he lived in a cave on the top of a mountain in Italy.  Though he lived as a hermit, Peter was not without administrative experience and ecclesiastical accomplishments.  He had founded dozens of monasteries in his lifetime, but he always retreated to his mountaintop to worship God; to actually be with God in the moment, not just in the afterlife.  His entire existence was about a sacred play with his God, and a pitched spiritual battle with the demonic forces of the world.  Though in perfect physical condition, he was also eighty-five years old when he was elected pope.  It took the Vatican party ten days of hiking and climbing to reach Peter the Hermit.  I like to imagine what was going through the minds of these cardinals, bishops, priests and acolytes, as Peter made them all into Appalachian Trail section hikers, going straight up.  Peter had been notified of the climbing delegation by one of his monks, and he was absolutely horrified with the news they were bringing to his high perch on the top of the planet.  Because of the arduous journey to reach him, Peter had time to think about his options.  So Peter did the only reasonable thing as the ecclesiastical and political leaders of the world were climbing towards his cave.  He hid.  Peter played hide and seek with the world.  Peter not here.  Go home.  For me that was the perfect image of the idealist-realist war in August.  Part of me wants to hide; part of me is still hiding tonight.  When Peter was finally located, he did the next most reasonable thing he could think of.  He turned down the job.  But the Church, the world, was not going to take no for an answer.  They were taking the wild Jesus figure back to St. Peter’s, whether he wanted to go or not.  The man who would not be pope was brought back down to earth by the realists.    

Now Peter had a really big problem.  He was now called Pope Celestine V.  Despite all of his protests that went unheeded, he really was an administrative nightmare.  Peter/Celestine (there’s irony there) absolutely hated the job, and he returned often to his work strategy of hiding.  Though he mystified everyone, especially those who were trying to help him with his duties, we would now say that Peter was depressed.  He was also having what we would call panic attacks.  Someone might diagnose him with Asperger’s Disorder.  After fifteen weeks, as Peter headed towards a full-blown nervous breakdown, a realist came to the idealist’s rescue.  Now the question of whether a pope can actually resign is an extremely complex question of canon law, and most ecclesiastical experts would say no.  It’s impossible.  But the realist on the scene, Cardinal Benedict Gaetani, showed as much finesse as Chief Justice Roberts on national health care.  He found a way for Peter to resign, and the idealist Christ figure was relieved beyond words.  Cardinal Gaetani would also finesse his way to become the next pope, Pope Boniface VIII.  The time of idealism had passed; it always has a short window.                    

            Though I like the static image of realist Cardinal Gaetani helping to find a way out for idealist Peter, I have to share how the story turns out.  The realists in the crowd demand it.  Peter wanted to return to his mountain--to live out his live praying to God on his mountaintop.  Instead Pope Boniface VIII put him in prison, where he eventually died in questionable circumstances. 

While listening to the beautiful Plainsong chanting of the monks at Holy Cross Monastery in 2012, I knew that I needed something more than idealism to begin this year.  That I needed something more than realism has always been patently obvious to me.  I’m a teacher, remember?  What I needed was wisdom.  Wisdom about myself and the world.  The truth was the papacy was a step down for Peter Morrone, the Don Quixote of the papacy, and he knew it at the time.  Wisdom is the dialectic between idealism and realism, the spiritual guide inside you.  It is how you live out your ideals in your daily life.  It is the most important thing that you possess.  When you write a chapel talk, which can be a challenging task for faculty members who talk all day, you impart something more than knowledge.  You convert knowledge into something golden, something meaningful and worthwhile, with a heartbeat.  When you counsel a student in crisis, as every one of you will do this year, maybe even this week, you are the wise woman and wise man for that student, that child of God, in the teachable moment.  When you help a student sort through the madness of the college process, you share your treasure of wisdom.  You give them courage to find their own wisdom despite everything their culture is screaming at them from all sides.  This can be a very difficult time for our students.  High school is still an awkward time for me.  And for Joe McDonough. 

So I don’t want to leave you hiding with Peter Morrone on the mountaintop.  It’s time to come down to a level place, a wise landing, to work for the common good.  Welcome back to Kent.  My God bless you in your teaching and wisdom ministry this year.    

My colleague Tom Hunt and I came up with an interesting baseball exercise on the way to the first no-hitter in Mets history last night. The task: field a team of the best players whom you saw play in their prime (or thereabouts) at least once. When boyish sentiment went up against cold statistics, I generally went with the former, and the players I had seen the most in my life.

First Base: Willie McCovey, San Francisco Giants (Keith Hernandez was a close second.)
Second Base: Joe Morgan, Reds and Giants (Ryne Sandberg as well, but I only saw him once.)
Shortstop: Ozzie Smith, St. Louis Cardinals (I should go with Jeter, but I always loved the movie The Wizard of Oz, and back flips.)
Third Base: George Brett, Kansas City Royals (My heart says Matt Williams...)
Catcher: Johnny Bench, Cincinnati Reds
Left Field: Rickey Henderson, Modesto and Oakland A's and nearly every professional baseball team in North America (Sorry, Barry Bonds, I work for the church...I would choose Joe Rudi before you. I would also pick Kevin Mitchell before you, and he was insane.)
Center Field: Ken Griffey, Jr., Mariners and Reds
Right Field: Andre Dawson, Expos and Cubs

Pitchers: Vida Blue, A's and Giants
Ron Guidry, New York Yankees
Bob Welch, Dodgers and A's
Tim Lincecum, San Francisco Giants
Catfish Hunter, A's and Yankees

(If I had to choose the best lefty of the era, I would choose Steve Carlton, but I can't recall seeing him pitch live.)

Relievers: Mariano Rivera, New York Yankees
Dennis Eckersley, Red Sox, Cubs, A's

Postscript, for the fun of it:
Manager: Billy Martin, Twins, Tigers, Rangers, Yankees, Yankees, A's, Yankees
Radio Commentator: Hank Greenwald, San Francisco Giants
Third Base Coach: Wendell Kim, San Francisco Giants
Mascot: Mr Met
Sportswriters: Roger Angell and Roger Kahn

Best Food: Garlic Fries, San Francisco Giants

That's it. Let's play two!

“Being the Love of God in the World”

20 May 2012

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph’s Chapel

Kent School

The Seventh Sunday after Easter

Well, here we are, with the end in sight, but we’re not quite there.  With just a week left of classes, I am tired.  But I’m not prepared for final exams.  There is a fatigue that is deep at this time of year; it is physical, emotional, and spiritual.  We, like the seniors in the class of 2012, are ready for the year to be over, but we’re not ready to say goodbye.  You have to dig deep for inspiration at this time of year.  This sermon is about just that kind of digging.  

This has also been a very challenging two weeks for the Kent community, and Canterbury School, with the Memorial Service for Donny Gowan last Monday.  Donny grew up in this community, and he coached here before becoming head basketball coach at Canterbury.  Donny is one of the most positive people I have ever met in my life.  For those affected by his untimely death, there are no easy answers.  But the outpouring of love and support for his family since last week has been extraordinary; it has made a difference.  It has lifted them up at a heartbreaking time, creating the vision for healing that will come in the future.  But now there is pain and loss. 

Even in the midst of sorrow, ordinary people around you have been digging deep, looking for hope in hard times.  Being with Donny’s basketball team on Monday, I could sense the transformation he had brought to those players’ lives, however incomplete it feels right now.  Like many others, I saw Donny’s own vocation and success as a coach as deeply connected to his late father’s example and legacy.  Donny’s work at Canterbury emerged from grief transformed, and it was beautiful to watch him grow.  Faith in God is about continued transformation, and I have no doubt that the hope and transformation of God comes to those in need by the people around them, doing ordinary acts of love, digging deep, and finding hope.  God comes into the world, however imperfectly, by our own actions and words.      

As I thought about Donny and Don his father, I was reminded of the book Hunting For Hope, subtitled “A Father’s Journeys,” by Scott Russel Sanders.  The memoir is an intent examination of the world’s problems, especially the destruction of the environment.  The book is part meditation, part travel journal as the author hikes the Rocky Mountains with his teenage son Jesse.  The father and son have moved into that vulnerable and often humorous stage of their relationship where the father can do nothing right.

The dialogue on the hike is rich between the environmentalist educator and his high school son who, unapologetically, likes to spend time in malls.  They begin their discussion on the trail, after several hours of silence, due to the son’s accusation that his father ruins everything.

“’How do I ruin everything?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ he said.

‘I want to know.  What is it about me that grates on you?’…

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he said.

‘Try me.’

‘You’re so out of touch.’

‘With what?’

‘With my whole world.  You hate everything that’s fun.  You hate television and movies and video games.  You hate my music.’

‘I like some of your music.  I just don’t like it loud.’

‘You hate advertising,’ he said quickly, rolling now.  ‘You hate billboards and lotteries and developers and logging companies and big corporations.  You hate snowmoblies and jet skis.  You hate malls and fashions and cars.’

‘You’re still on my case because I won’t buy a Jeep?’ I said, harking back to another old argument.

‘Forget Jeeps.  You can look at any car and all you think is pollution, traffic, roadside crap.  You say fast food’s poisoning our bodies and TV’s poisoning our minds.  You think the Internet is just another scam for selling stuff.  You think business is a conspiracy to rape the earth.’

‘None of that bothers you?’

‘Of course it does.  But that’s the world.  That’s where we’ve got to live.  It not going to go away because you don’t approve.  What’s the good of spitting on it?’

‘I don’t spit on it.  I grieve over it.’

He was still for a moment, then resumed quietly.  ‘What’s the good of grieving if you can’t change anything?’

‘Who says you can’t change anything?’

‘You do.  Maybe not with your mouth, but with your eyes.’  Jesse rubbed his own eyes, and the words came out muffled through his cupped hands.  ‘Your view of things is totally dark.  It bums me out.  You may feel the whole planet’s dying and people are to blame and nothing can be done about it.  There’s no room for hope.  Maybe you can get by without hope, but I can’t.  I’ve got a lot of living still to do.  I have to believe there’s a way we can get out of this mess.  Otherwise what’s the point?  Why study, why work—why do anything if it’s all going to hell?’

That sounded unfair to me, a caricature of my views, and I thought of many sharp replies; yet there was too much truth and too much hurt in what he said for me to fire back an answer.  Had I really deprived my son of hope?  Was this the deeper grievance—that I had passed on to him, so young, my anguish over the world?  Was this what lurked between us, driving us apart, the demon called despair?”

The changing relationship with his son Jesse is the catalyst for changes within the father; deep changes as the elder reorients himself to the hope no human being can live without.  The father and the son are both right; but what are we going to do about it?  Our world cannot survive for long without the song of hope stirring in someone. 

As a boy growing up, I remember how the secondhand stories of my own father affected me—stories about how people survived in the very difficult times before our own.  My father was a veteran of World War II, a survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7^th, 1941, as a sailor in the navy.  He saw the first Japanese zero airplanes fly into Pearl Harbor, and, like many others, he initially thought they were our own airplanes (they had to be)—until he was being strafed by gunfire himself.  The worst my father got was a scraped knee, but he watched many men lose their lives around him, and it affected him deeply.  He was forever changed. 

            Like many veterans, my father was mostly quiet about his experience of war, sometimes completely silent, shut like a steel trap.  I never heard the stories all at once.  They came out indirectly, at odd angles of conversation, in the unexpected moments between a father and son, the surprising, and often elusive, shape of hope between generations.  Sometimes I could coax the stories out, and I could feel their power in what he said, and what he didn’t say. 

My favorite story of my father’s—it’s really no more than an image—involves President Franklin Roosevelt.  My father worked in naval intelligence, under Admiral Chester Nimitz, the Chief of Naval Operations.  On an unforgettable occasion, President Roosevelt flew to Hawaii to meet with Admiral Nimitz, and my father was able to meet the President of the United States, at a great moment in human history.  Yes, Roosevelt was like a god in my family--but not the kind of god anyone expected. 

At this time in the early 1940s, most buildings were not accessible to those with disabilities.  The great secret, a secret guarded by the White House and protected by the media was that the president was a disabled man, from polio at the age of 39.  He never walked again, but this was not acknowledged publicly during his lifetime.  The most powerful man in the world was fighting against Tojo, Mussolini, and Hitler from a wheelchair.  Not only that, his wheelchair couldn’t negotiate the naval headquarters at Pearl Harbor, and some of the planning for the war in the Pacific took place on ships in the harbor as well.  How did the President of the United States get around the naval base?  A large marine, just a teenager like you, would pick him up and carry him piggy back from one place to another.  What a sight for my father to witness. 

How can you see that and not be changed in how you see the world? 

            God is still with us, even in the darkest moments, carrying us with the tender and strong hands of human hope, picking us up as we dig deep.  God is with us now, in our day, and even to the end of the ages.  God is with us in how we carry each other during tough times.  My father witnessed the fear and destruction of December 7^th, 1941.  He saw the war from beginning to end.  Yet it increased his faith.  As a matter of fact, he had no faith—not really—before the war.  He came to believe in God, but not a god who fixes our problems, who stops our wars by magic, or one who heals our planet by waving a wand.  This is a God who stands with us as we face our problems together.  Our God doesn’t change the world for us.  We have to stand on our feet, sometimes with help from each other.  God changes the world by changing our hearts.  We change the world by reaching out to our neighbors in need.  That’s how it works.

Mohatma Ghandi once said these words to those who hungered for change in the last century: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”  Can the students of this school, especially the graduating seniors, change the world?  The better, more intimate question comes instead for all of us today: Can one person have a change of heart?  A change in one’s whole way of thinking and feeling and being in the world.  The answer is yes; a glorious affirmation of all that is still good in us, still digging deep, even in adversity and sorrow.  Be the change that you want to see in the world.  Be the change that you want to see in this community.  

I will close this morning with a simple poem by the playwright Jose Rivera.  The poem is an odd one, as poems go; it’s just a list of the first times that you do something: your first times that you remember at the end of the year.  This is the first time the class of 2012 has graduated from Kent, or the juniors to experience Tapping and Rock Day tomorrow and Tuesday.  These first times could be ordinary events that you rush past on the way to…where are we going anyway?  Kids want to grow up and be adults, and adults long for their lost youth.  We envy you, and you envy us.  It’s crazy the way we are.  I think there is another way: to be completely awake in the moment, especially in our golden goodbyes this year.  Then this poem, this list of firsts, becomes your own witness to the beauty and wonder of your life, and the deep and abiding love of the Creator God, which is there for those who are diggers for hope.

From Jose Rivera:       

The first time a child trusts you to carry them to the next room.

The first time you drive from Westfield, Massachusetts, to San Diego, with someone you’re in love with.

The first time you watch birth.

The first lines of Paradise Lost.

The first time you make a decisive three point shot in a game that really counts.

The first time you get the dog to go to the bathroom outside.

The first time you can read “I love you” in a lover’s eyes.

The first family reunion without homicidal fantasies.

The first love letter.

The first serious talk about love with your child.

The first epiphany.

The first time you hear Lorca in Spanish.

The first real friendship with a person of another race.

The first gray hair.

The first time you see Picasso’s Guernica.

The first time you visit your birthplace.

The first time you hear Lightning Hopkins.

The first visible comet.

The first time you feel attractive and someone calls you “angel.”

The first experience with something remotely like a god.

The first recovery after a serious illness.

The first time therapy makes sense.

The first birthday of your first born.

The first time you can’t walk and your lover carries you to the next room.

The first foul ball you catch in Fenway Park.

The first time you stand alone and you’re scared to death and you don’t change your position.

The first time you’re convinced of your mortality and you laugh.

The first sunrise after the first death of a parent.

The first time you forgive the unforgivable.

The first time you see the Earth from space.

The first time it is truly obvious that it was better that you had lived, at this time, in this world.

The first time you decide every moment of your life should be a work of art.

The first time you die and you breathe again and you speak to the living.

The first time you realize that it all just might have been okay.