Rector.com for March 28, 2003
Feeling stressed?  For most of us anxiety about the war has added to the already heavy load of worries that most of us carry from day to day.  The result can be physically painful.  You have all seen those lists on TV of symptoms of stress: change in eating patterns, difficulty in sleeping, irritability, stomach and headaches, we’ve all been there.  There is also the tendency to spiritually “shut-down’ when we are feeling emotionally stressed.  Our prayer life goes flat (or disappears entirely), worship seems like just going through the motions, service to others becomes one more burden.
There is no doubt that our Lenten awareness of own fragility, limitations, and sinfulness will be more intense this year.  Maybe that is a good thing.  Bishop Borsch used to half-jokingly wish people a “really awful Lent.”  Another clergy friend of mine wrote, “If you feel even more depressed and out of it this Lent, you are probably doing something right!”  I don’t think comments like that are meant to be masochistic.  Jesus faced his time in the wilderness, and so must we.  The great saints usually report a “dark night of the soul,” and most of us are familiar with such darkness.  The good news in all of this is, of course, that there will be a dawn, there will be an Easter.   In the meantime, we can learn to embrace our limitations and our dependence on God alone.  Writer Thomas More said somewhere that “only by refusing to run away from our anxiety and our depression, do we learn who we really are, and what God calls us to do.”
May we all have such a Lent!
News Around the Parish
Fr. Aidan Koh just returned from a five day visit to Haiti to meet with other people from the Episcopal Church engaged in mission work there.  He reports a sad decline in conditions since his last visit and states that “What the people want more than any thing is some sign of hope.”
Parish Administrator Marion Coogan continues to recover at home where she would be happy to receive your cards and notes: 3517 Downing Ave. Glendale, CA  91208. 
Please keep in your prayers those who are ill or recovering at home or in the hospital: Fr. Al Davis, Elizabeth Hord, Jill Leng, Mary Morton, Marion James, Helen Nelson, Edna Hogarth. Marion and Bill Coogan, June Byrum, J.R. Hendrixs, Ruth Wilson. Joycelin Montouth, and the Leng family in their grief.  
Coming Events
Baptismal class in preparation for April 27th baptism begin this Sunday and runs for three weeks at 9:30 in the conference room.  Please call Fr. Byrum at extension 107 if you have questions or wish to register.  
The Sunday adult forums will not meet on March 23, 30, April 6, 13
Lent Event set for March 30.  This year our Lenten
program will be compressed into one day as we welcome Dr. George Regas, former Rector of All Saint’s Pasadena and internationally
known peace and justice advocate.  Dr. Regas will preach at both services that day and then lead a lunchtime parish workshop in the parish hall until 2:30 PM that same day.  A catered lunch will be available for $5.  There will be child-care and a special program for the children sponsored by our youth group.  Plan now to attend this major parish
event.
During Wednesdays in Lent, the Holy Eucharist will be
offered at 6:30 PM in the chapel.
Confirmation Sunday is April 27 at 10:30 when our new Bishop, Jon Bruno will be with us for the first time.  If you have not yet been confirmed in the church, this will be a great time for you to do so.  The requirement is for you to take the St. James’ 101 class, if you have not already done so. 
Saint of the Week
Monday, March 30: John Donne, poet and priest 1631. John Donne was one of the greatest English religious poets.  He is rightly portrayed in one of our stained glass windows at St. James’.   Although raised a Roman Catholic, he had little interest in religion, and lived a rather dissolute life as a student, in the process penning some passionate love poetry.  After many career disasters, he eventually was ordained in the Anglican Church, eventually becoming Dean of St. Paul’s cathedral, where 
thousands flocked to hear him preach.  Some lines of his poetry, such as “Ask not for whom the bell tolls/It tolls for thee,” have become part of everyday language.  Here is another of his great poems, full of erotic imagery:
Holy Sonnet
Batter my heart, three person’d God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, to blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me; for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Final thought
Two quotes from Frederick Buechner
To confess your sins to God is not tell Him anything He does not already know.  Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you.  When you confess them, they become the bridge.
****
Who knows how the awareness of God’s love first hits people.  Every person has his own tale to tell, including the person who would not believe in God if you paid him.  Some moment happens in your life that you say Yes right up to the roots of your hair, that makes it worth having been born just to have happen.  Laughing with somebody till the tears run down your cheeks.  Waking up to the first snow. Being in bed with somebody you love.  
Whether you thank God for such a moment or thank your lucky stars, it is a moment that is trying to open up your whole life.  If you turn your back on such a moment and hurry along to Business as Usual, it may lose you the ball game.  If you throw your arms around such a moment and hug it like crazy, it may save your soul.
How about the person you know who as far as you can possibly tell has never had such a moment?-- the soreheads and slobs of the world, the ones the world has hopelessly crippled?  Maybe for that person the moment that has to happen is you.  Salvation is a process, not an event.
Prayer of the Week 
O God, you gave us a garden of Eden, and we chose to wander in deserts of our own making. You gave us the Light of the World, and we chose to do our night crawling. Forgive us our squandering, our wandering, our lack of commitment. Forget not your covenant with us, O God, and choose us still to tell your Good News, to give all that we have, that all might be one in your peace. 
-- from Ann Weems, Searching for Shalom
Lessons to be read in church: Lent IV:  Exodus 20: 1-17;  Psalm 122; Romans 7: 13-25; John 6:4-15.
