Author: Kyle

Looking out beyond the walls

App Development: Day 5

Kyle

Yesterday things shifted a bit. I can feel my priorities changing as my time here draws to an end. I’m out of free-ranging learning mode (building skills for future app development) and into a place where I hope to have a glossy prototype to show the folks here before I leave, to see if they’re interested in me adding the last bit of functionality and putting it in the app store.

Yesterday was also another slower day after the late night previously. I got to take in the local watering hole with my buddy Andrew and enjoy some excellent key lime pie. Look for one last update before I leave this evening!

Working in my room

App development: Day 4

Kyle

I continue to break what might be the most important rule in this place. Let me explain.

You see, what we’re interested in, eventually, in the CMT is a rule of life app (more on why an app might be an appropriate companion to a rule of life in another post). So it seemed like a natural fit, when I was looking for a quiet place to spend a week learning how to write code for the iPhone, to live for a week in a community with a robust and well-integrated rule.

Indeed it has been, more so than I could imagine. People at Richmond Hill have been generous with their thoughts on community life, keeping a rule, making technology personal and local, etc. It’s been great fun and great learning, and I’m so fortunate to be working in such a nurturing environment.

The problem is that I’m not very good at working in the environment, at least on its own terms. For me, programming is a very immersive activity; it doesn’t lend itself well to well-defined blocks of time–which is how all work has to happen in this quasi-monastery. Even though the prayer bells can be my salvation (it’s always good to walk away from your code for a bit), I tend to greet them with hostility, because they’re almost always interrupting either my work or my sleep. I’m driven by urgency (the shortness of this precious time away) and joy (it’s so much fun to get things working in my app) to keep going: fix one more bug, add one more feature. But the rhythm of the rule at Richmond Hill chimes ever onward as well.

I’m certainly not alone in my computer programming habits; this is how many of us tend to work, and it’s part of the joy and frustration of this particular charism. But I can’t help but wonder, as I fight the fatigue of a late night of programming in my retreat room, what spiritual practices I’ll need to help support further app development when I’m outside the walls of this quasi-monastery and will have plenty more interruptions than thrice-daily prayer bells.

So even though I’ve struggled against the rule of stabilitas (stability) while I’ve been here, I hope my time in this community will help me take some of that spirit back with me.

Clay vessels, in the dishwasher

App Development: Day 3

Kyle

Yesterday was a harder day. The programming details were less fun, more picky. A small victory was that I got the toy app I’ve been working on loaded onto my iPhone for the first time. That’s a cool feeling. On the other hand, the program crashed for the first time yesterday as well (map views are tricky, it turns out).

I worked something like 14 hours on Tuesday (on the joy of progress and the adrenaline of being able to work uninterrupted), and yesterday that caught up with me. I went out in the evening to walk around the Carytown neighborhood, which is a cool place. Had a nice conversation with a Thai bartender who’s been here 15 years after three in Northern Virginia. He likes it better here, and I understand why. Feels more like cities in the Midwest: a little slower, more manageable, less traffic-ridden.

On the whole, it was a messier day, and I’m glad to be working at a place that acknowledges the messiness of our faith so well. I loved this picture of the Wednesday morning mass vessels in the community dishwasher. You could do worse for an icon of this place.

Development at Richmond Hill

App Development: Day 2

Kyle 1 Comment

Day 2 went (or at least ended) well enough that I feel like I can let the cat out of the bag and start making these posts public.

On the technical front: I was up late, but I made a lot of progress learning Xcode, the development environment Apple provides for writing iOS apps. What’s so cool is how easy Xcode makes it to get prototypes up and running. Maybe tonight I’ll have some screenshots to share.

On the missional front: I had a great conversation with members of the community here. Ben Campbell, the pastoral director, reminded me that one of the themes of Richmond Hill‘s proclamation is that the church as we so often know it has a real spiritual problem regarding locality. We talk a lot of general, eternal, universal truth but not nearly enough particular, immediate, and local truth (e.g., “People know more about Afghanistan than they know about the housing project down the street”). So we had some cool ideas about how prayer and spirituality apps can take on local scope (for you computer programmers: pun intended).

Loving what I’m doing here, and grateful for the hospitality and mission of this place.

Stained glass at Richmond Hill

App Development: Day 1

Kyle

It feels good to be working on a spirituality app in the prayerful and purposeful confines of Richmond Hill. This convent-turned-ecumenical-community with a continuing vocation to pray for and work in the city is one of those gems representing the very best of what the church can be. The community Eucharist tonight doubled as a commissioning service for alums of Richmond Hill’s spiritual direction and healing prayer training programs. These wise souls  are now, as I understand it, considered adjunct staff members of Richmond Hill, helping empower the community’s ministry of spiritual transformation. It was a pleasure to be among them, and I took the proceedings as a reassuring sign that I’m in the right place and doing the right work.

Another lovely bit of convergence: pastoral director Ben Campbell’s Epiphany sermon was about the “open-source messiah.” He’s a stirring preacher. The highlight for me: “You have to be pretty grounded in the Spirit to give a baby the gift of myrrh, the dark spice of death; and you have to be pretty grounded to receive it as a gift.” It was something like that, and it brought me up short indeed (not unlike a “creche to cross” sermon I heard recently).

Image source: Chris Wolff CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

When Advent gets away from us

Kyle

Advent 4, Year C (Luke 1:39-55)

PDF | Audio (or via Dropbox) | Text:

Image source: Chris Wolff CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

—

Three weeks ago, Bishop Steven Miller bid us to embrace the present moment and put on the splendid apparel that is ours in Christ Jesus. Two weeks ago, Fr. Humphrey helped us name the grief and loss in all our lives and to arm us with the only protection we have: love. Last week, Fr. Andrew turned our attention to John the Baptist’s message of repentance and our responsibility to examine the things that set us off in the wrong direction.

“Live in the now.” “Love even if it hurts.” “Leave your sin behind.” These are fine Advent exhortations, all. Filled with joyful expectation of Christ’s first and second coming. Filled with trust that this hope can make a real difference in our lives. I believe it can, and I hope you do too.

But how’d it go for us, this time around? How did we do, with these exhortations or with our own observances? It’s hard not to ask ourselves these questions on the final Sunday of Advent, especially in these years when week four isn’t much of a week at all. We are a results-driven society, a success-oriented society. As we approach the finish line, we want to take stock of the distance we’ve traveled. We have traveled, right? We’ve kept our holy Advent?

Maybe not. Not the way we planned to anyway. Or maybe we didn’t even get to the planning stage. Let me speak only for myself and say that, as usual, I have been spinning my wheels intermittently, trying too hard when I’ve tried at all. I feel like another Advent has gotten away from me. Perhaps you feel that way as well.

There is spiritual danger in Advent and Lent, these short seasons of repentance and preparation leading up to our joyous principal feasts. The danger for many of us is this: We start to worry that if we do not do our part, God will not do God’s part. We’re not worried that Christmas and Easter won’t happen, not exactly. We’re worried they won’t happen for us, that we’ll somehow mess them up, that our preparation will prove inadequate.

In this matter there is good news for us this morning, my sisters and brothers: Because that is not the way divine love and divine action work in our lives. God is not so easily thwarted. Luke especially among the evangelists is not shy about reminding us of this reality. Indeed, he makes the case in his very first chapter, in three stories about three divine visitations.

The first visit, of course, is to Zechariah, who meets the angel Gabriel while doing his priestly duties in the temple, duties he was chosen for that day by lot. But according to Luke, it was anything but chance that brought Zechariah to that place of divine encounter: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah,” the angel says, “for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth.”

Luke doesn’t let us miss the parallels between Elizabeth and Zechariah on the one hand and Sarah and Abraham on the other, both couples apparently infertile and getting on in years. It’s as if God is saying, “Remember how I built a great nation from Abraham and Sarah? Well hold on to your hats, because I’m at work in the world still, and you and your wife are right in the thick of it.”

Does Zechariah’s hesitant disbelief derail the events God has set in motion through this family? Nope, God just makes it part of the plan: The angel says to Zechariah, “[B]ecause you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.” His months of silence add greater drama to the prophecy he eventually speaks to his son: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he hath visited and redeemed his people.” In that moment, the first among those redeemed is Zechariah himself. His doubt was no problem for God.

The next and most famous visit is the angel’s annunciation to Mary, who proves more thoughtful and open, saying “yes” to the angel’s strange greeting and stranger plan. Despite her confusion, she accepts that “nothing will be impossible with God.” And we have to agree with that remarkable assessment as we hear Luke narrate the divine details: We learn that Mary is a fitting choice not only for her favor in God’s eyes, but because her husband-to-be is a descendent of the great King David, from whom Jesus will inherit his throne. Plus, Luke adds, almost in passing, like it’s no big deal, it turns out that Mary’s relative Elizabeth is none other than the wife of Zechariah, about whom, well, see above. By the end of this second visitation, we’re getting the idea that the events unfolding share a heavenly momentum indeed.

Our gospel lesson this morning, the third visitation, is the icing on this already very elaborate cake. Here a final unlikely sign precedes the singing of a stunning canticle that captures the spirit of all that has come before it. In this last scene, Mary and her unborn son are received by more than just Elizabeth, more even than Elizabeth and the prophet who leaps inside her. Luke tells us that Mary’s cousin is also “filled with the Holy Spirit.” Through that Spirit, she gives thanks for the visitation of “the mother of [her] Lord,” a woman who “”believed there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her.”

So we get the sense at last that the characters have been gathered: Mary, who will sing the song; Elizabeth, who introduces and hears it; Jesus and John, unborn but not unacknowledged; perhaps Zechariah, sitting quietly in a corner; and the Holy Spirit, who has been working overtime setting this scene and who has spoken through the assembled prophets. Then, finally, we hear the words we know so well:

My soul doth magnify the Lord, *

   and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.

For he hath regarded *

   the lowliness of his handmaiden.

For behold from henceforth *

   all generations shall call me blessed.

For he that is mighty hath magnified me, *

   and holy is his Name.

And his mercy is on them that fear him *

   throughout all generations.

He hath showed strength with his arm; *

   he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat, *

   and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things, *

   and the rich he hath sent empty away.

He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel, *

   as he promised to our forefathers,

   Abraham and his seed for ever.

 

This song is nothing more or less than the work the Almighty has been doing with us since the beginning, work renewed in a singular way in the events of this magnificent first chapter of Luke: showing mercy and strength, taking the powerful to task and the vulnerable to pasture, fulfilling the promise of salvation to and through the people of God.

And to think we thought we could screw it up by forgetting to say our prayers or getting overly busy with Christmas shopping. No, I stand here to say to you that the Spirit has been powerfully at work in our lives these last three weeks, even if we forgot to send an invitation and even if we didn’t notice. So if it feels like this Advent has gotten away from you, take a few minutes between now and tomorrow night to ponder what this might mean.

What were you expecting Advent to sound like? Did we skip your favorite seasonal hymn? Well, perhaps the voice of a friend or family member announced the theme that will be with you through the days ahead. What were you expecting Advent to look like? Were you seeking the luminescent countenance of an angel? Perhaps the Spirit visited in the simple lighting of an advent wreath when the night was dark and cold.

What were you expecting Advent to feel like? Are you left on this Christmas Eve’s eve with a sense of incompleteness, or anxiety, or confusion? Don’t let Luke’s orderly account convince you that God’s servants don’t, or shouldn’t have those experiences. On either side of the rejoicing that accompanied these visits and these births, surely there was worry and regret, a sense that everything was happening too fast, or too soon, or the wrong way. Just ask Joseph, or read the first couple chapters of Matthew.

No, the Advents that get away from us are the most useful ones of all, because they remind us that our preparation, repentance, and hopeful anticipation are not confined to any season and that it is God, and not we ourselves, who accomplishes in us the work of salvation. The birth, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus are pure gift, and as we tell the story one more time, the Spirit will open our eyes to new ways we might experience that gift.

So perhaps it’s appropriate for us to turn the collect for the fourth Sunday of Advent around, in grateful acknowledgement of God’s sure presence with us this season. Let us pray:

Almighty God, we thank you for your daily visitation, wherein our consciences are purified; our hopes, rekindled; and your intentions for our lives, revealed—in your good time and by your good grace. We thank you for fashioning within us a mansion for your Son, where we trust that he will dwell with us and order our lives in accordance with your will. Our spirits rejoice in you, O God our Savior, and holy is your name. Amen.

Source: idleformat CC BY 2.0 via Flickr: http://bit.ly/stonePhoto

Jesus Is Our (Metaphorical) Rock

Kyle

Thursday in 1 Advent, Year 1 (Isaiah 26:1-6, Ps 118:19-24, Matt 7:21-27)

PDF | Audio (or via Dropbox) | Text:

Image source: idleformat CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

—

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

In college, I worked as a writing tutor. As word of this avocation got out to my friends, they started asking me to help with resumes and with statements for various applications. Probably the most useful idea I shared with them was something I’d been told, and tried to follow, when I was writing my own statements. “To get the readers to remember you,” the advice went, “you have to get them to imagine you doing the things you mention.” In other words: show, don’t tell.

And so I might recommend adding a paragraph that, to take a particular example, drew a picture of my friend’s experience building concrete canoes for a civil engineering competition. Yes, it was great that in so doing he had learned to be mindful of the intricacies of mixing ratios, but that message was more likely to stick if his readers actually pictured him out on the river for that first precarious test-paddle. We both hoped that the image helped the idea become better integrated in the mind of the reader: “Oh, Mike So-and-so, yeah, he was the concrete canoe guy, right?”

Of course, the great power of pictures and symbols, of metaphor and imagination, is not news to the inheritors of a tradition shaped by the likes of John the Evangelist, Augustine of Hippo, and Ignatius Loyola. They each knew that forming and nourishing disciples is about much more than presenting ideas to us. It’s about helping those ideas gain some purchase within, in our minds, yes, but even more so in our hearts. They knew, and we know, that biblical and theological imagery can, if we let it, get inside us, becoming, in one author’s words “part of ourselves … absorbed into our very life” [Martin Thornton, Christian Proficiency (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1988): 77.].

If we believe the words of scripture can act upon us in this way, then liturgies like today’s present an embarrassment of riches for our spiritual nourishment. At the center are Jesus’s words from Matthew’s gospel: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock” (Matthew 7:24-25). Jesus and his teachings are our bedrock, our sure foundation—vast, dependable, and in an important sense unbreakable.

You probably noticed these images of rock and stone throughout our lections today, and each appearance offers its own richness, its own power to reach our inner nooks and crannies. My moment of intimate encounter came with the recapitulation of the image in our Communion Hymn: “On Christ the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand.” When we drop the conceit of the house and put our own two feet squarely on that rock, or in that sand, it seems to change things.

“Sinking sand” reminded me immediately of my inbox, and my relationship with it, of how quickly the dream of tidiness and control slips through my fingers as requests, reports, and referrals pile up. My strategies are sinking sand, my plans for getting through the day on my own efforts rather than by trusting that I am supported and saved by a rock and redeemer who doesn’t care what my inbox, or even my resume, looks like. All other ground is sinking sand.

An image can do its full formative work on our hearts and souls only if we invite it in and bid it stay a while. That’s what these contemplative seasons are all about. What will your image be? Advent, of course, has plenty of worthy pictures for us to choose from and sit with: light in the darkness, a highway in the desert, hills toppled and valleys raised, strange messengers from earth and heaven. But I think, in what for us is a season of papers, exams, grading, shopping, and last-minute travel, we could do worse than to spend our time with the image of our “everlasting rock” (Isaiah 26:4). Our houses, and our hopes, can be built on nothing less.

me on our wedding day. shout.

CSC gets a new look

Kyle

It was about time. OK, it was past time.

The old Blogger-based Contraria Sunt Complementa site has been a good personal and professional home base for me since David Meerman Scott convinced me how much I needed one back in 2007. But it was starting to look more than a little dated, and a fresh start seemed like a more tenable project than an overhaul did.

A number of professional projects have me very interested in getting better at WordPress. (Regarding these new projects: “more soon,” which has become the most-used phrase in my vocabulary after “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”). Thus, I’ve moved over to that platform. I’ve worked with WP before, but I’m realizing just how much I’ve been missing out on, even just within the world of free themes.

So I hope you like the new look, built on Oxygen by DevPress. And I hope you don’t mind switching over to my new feed. As always, thanks for reading—and enjoy!

Gathering with the Saints

Kyle 2 Comments
PDF | Audio (or via Dropbox) | Text:
Ephesians 1:11-22 (All Saints Day, Year C [long story], RCL)
“I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers” (Ephesians 1:15–16). I hope the author of the Letter to the Ephesians won’t mind me borrowing these words. I share their sense of thanksgiving, though I direct them at a different church at a different time. You see, when I think of the saints and a city’s love for them, I think first of my pilgrimage to Rome.
I was there with a group of seminarians and clergy representing VTS at churches and events throughout the Eternal City, including mass at an English-speaking Jesuit parish and even a papal audience. We brought to Italy all kinds of questions on our syllabus. But perhaps most of all, we went to figure out what we might make of the saints. That was certainly the case for me.
“What do we make of the saints?” I see now that it was the wrong question, too concerned with forming a theological position. The better question for a pilgrimage is this: “What did God make of the saints?” Or, borrowing again from Ephesians, “What are the riches of God’s glorious inheritance among the saints?” What did God give to them? What does God give us,through them? These are questions for an encounter.
Our group’s most intimate encounter took place not in Rome but on a day trip to Assisi. That medieval town captures well, through juxtaposition, the power of God’s gifts to Blessed Francis, who was born into wealth but came to embrace a path of poverty. The people who built a basilica in his honor seem to have forgotten the humility of his spiritual heritage. So we pilgrims were drawn first and foremost not to the basilica but to the modest oratory of San Damiano, where young Francis once prayed and heard Christ on the cross tell him “Francis, rebuild my church.”
Several of my companions and I spent five or ten quiet minutes in the tiny, dilapidated nave. As we shuffled in awkwardly, we gave each other some space and slowly settled in to pray. I looked up at a replica of that painted, once-talking crucifix, and the moment took on a noticable weight. No, Jesus didn’t talk to me. But I was aware that I was soaking up … something.
When we exited, my friend Caleb asked “Did anybody else feel that?” He and I had not been alone. We didn’t know what that was, exactly. But I’m pretty sure the group had, together, a gentle but profound experience of the grace and presence of our Lord. Francis’s witness to the simplicity of the spiritual life became a window through which we caught that glimpse. Saints are like that: windows for beholding grace.
We were also fortunate to take a number of “vertical tours” of other important sites, descending through the layers of time to the streets of Rome in the first few centuries of the Church. The most dramatic of these was our tour of the Vatican necropolis. Several stories below St. Peter’s Basilica, these excavations uncovered in the 1940s the site that many believe to be Peter’s final resting place. Our earnest tour guide made a compelling case for their authenticity, but the significance for me wasn’t about whether the several visible bones we saw belonged to St. Peter or not.
What was moving to me was both the tenacity and the tenderness with which these Roman Christians, like their forebearers, claimed Peter as one of their own. The same was true of other saints at the major churches around the city. “Here lies St. Agnes,” we heard later in the week on her feast day. “She was was one of us.”
So our trip painted an interesting picture of our “inheritance among the saints.” We saw them serve as windows for grace, their gifts enlightening our hearts to see the power of God and the persistence of Christ’s call. We saw them serve as links in the great chain of the Christian faith, binding us one to another across both time and place. Today we give thanks for those links as we bind ourselves in the Spirit to Michael Sebastian Freeland in the sacrament of baptism, and as we sit with the news that Fr. Andrew will be retiring as rector of St. Paul’s at the end of January.
Such is the liminal nature of the Church God has made of the saints. God has called us to pay particular attention to comings and goings because we witness to a kingdom that has come and is yet to come.
There’s a fatigue that can set in, living this way. It’s the fatigue of Francis and his homeless friars, called by Christ into the countryside to tirelessly preach the gospel. It’s the fatigue of building church on top of church in restless tribute of saints striving to saints in joy. It’s the fatigue of running a church like this one, of filling the rotas and planning the budgets and always saying hello and goodbye to people we love.
But there is more to the story of our “inheritance among the saints.” There is good news that energizes both the Eternal City and the Letter to the Ephesians. It’s one of the things that sets this letter apart from the ones we know for sure that Paul wrote. It’s the fullness of what this writer means by the word “inheritance.”
Our inheritance is that we are to be gathered up.*
Our inheritance is that we are being made a part of the great “fullness of him who fills all in all.” Listen to the verse that immediately precedes our passage from this morning: “With all wisdom and insight [God] has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”
So our inheritance with the saints is not just our salvation through Christ, which is how St. Paul usually puts it. It’s not just the treasury of past and present witness to that good news, which the saints so boldly proclaimed with words and with their very lives. Our shared inheritance is that we will be made a part of a cosmic unity with the saints and with the one who has already gathered them up. The saints are for us a sign of this inheritance, like the seal with which we are marked by the Holy Spirit in baptism–but easier for us to see, because the saints are dynamic, concrete, human.
I remember the first time I saw the Roman skyline. I was on my way to the stunning Galleria Borghese, north of the central city and up the kind of hill that you’d have to have Borghese money to live on. I was overcome by the number and variety of cupolas and crosses below, every one marking a central point in the life of a real community giving and living their lives to Jesus Christ.
But the next day I discovered an even better place to take in that tableau. So if you find yourself in Rome, and if you can keep it from going to your head, head over to St. Peter’s. Don’t ascend all the way to the cupola, the great dome, or you’ll lose the effect. Head for the rooftop gift shop, but keep walking past it, back toward St. Peter’s Square. You’ll find that you’re approaching, from behind, the statues of the saints that stand on top of the basilica’s facade.


Pick your patron saint, or perhaps head for the statue of Christ himself in the center. Get as close as you can, joining the ranks of those who witnessed to our Lord in life and witness to him still. Then gaze out at the city with them, a city that has the saints in its very bones. What you might experience, by the grace of God, is something like our inheritance in Christ. Not just because it is grand or beautiful or triumphant, but because in that moment you too will be gathered up with those who have been gathered already. Sadly, for now, it will be a fleeting thing.
We went to Rome looking to see our inheritance with the saints, but Ephesians tells us we cannot find it there or anywhere else, because it is a future reality. Our inheritance is, at last and forever, to be gathered up in Christ, with the saints and with all creation. So perhaps, for now, it is enough just to be gathered, gathered around Christ, gathered here, gathered with each other, gathered to celebrate All Saints’ Sunday. May it be, to us, a foretaste of the gathering to come.

* I am indebted here to Paul L. Hammer’s article on “Inheritance” in David Noel Freedman, ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Volume 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1992): 415–417.