He is Risen!

This is Easter Week! Happy Day! It was a zany week last week and I had a few really great learning and loving experiences. Here are my highlights and thoughts going into the weekend.

Highlights:
- Realizing about an hour before Maundy Thursday's service that I was celebrating--and that the prayer (Prayer A in the BCP), though a really standard and regular one was not one that I had ever "done" before as a priest. It was a good reminder to me that I am really new at all this. I think because I have worked at churches all my adult life, and been in churches all of my life I sometimes can forget that there is so much NEW  stuff for me as a priest. It was scary. It went fine! But this, among other things during Holy Week made me want to take a moment to reflect on all of the learning I have done in these six months or so of being a priest.

-I really liked the Contemplative Way of the Cross services that we did along with Grace Church, Brooklyn Heights. I liked working very collaboratively with another parish, and another priest. And I liked the quiet, candle lit services as a way of ending the day. It was some nice calm to balance out some of the chaos of Eggs and Easter!

- I loved make eggs and stuffing candy with our Sunday School kids. It was a really great way to be with them.

-And then the Easter Egg hunt was just great! It was so nice to be outside, and the kids did a great job of following the rules (no running, no pushing smaller kids, etc.) and were all understanding that a large portion of the eggs should go to The Gathering Place, where our sandwiches go every Sunday to feed homeless people in Brooklyn.

-And finally I liked taking my afternoon nap on Sunday when it was all done!

So here are the things left swirling around my head:

I have been thinking about resurrection a lot, obviously. It is the time to do that. On Wednesday at our free weekly organ concert, Gregory Eaton played a piece called "Resurrection" by Larry King (not the show host, rather the former organist at Trinity Wall Street). Gregory talked about the way that King hoped the piece would evoke not only Jesus' resurrection but also the resurrection of the social consciousness. It was a fascinating piece of music. I was sort of stirring this around in my brain still when I went to a talk last night. It was put on by the reparations committee of the Diocese of NY and was called "Remember, Repair, Restore, and Reconcile: Exploring the Church's Resurrecting Role in Reparations" and featured Dr. Jennifer Harvey. I went having read a book Harvey edited for a class I audited a couple of years ago. I also went because I have liked the work that the reparations committee does (a talk by the French Church examining their role in the slave trade was fascinating). Anyway, Harvey gave an interesting talk (for me it was not that "new" in that I guess I am well read on the subject). But what was new to me was connecting the concept of resurrection to reparations. Very cool. Here is a quick summary of her talk (and I am sure very unfair to her). Harvey talked about the reconciliation model as being the ones churches talk about most, the beloved community. Focused on being diverse, and inclusive. But also saying this hasn't really worked. Churches are still as segregated (or separate--depending) as they were before the civil rights movement. And this model considers the separateness itself to be the problem. This is opposition  to the reparations model which says we must begin at the beginning, look at the ways that the church supported, and benefited from slavery (and from the treatment of Native Americans). To know the hurt, pain and suffering it caused for others and to apologize for that.  She also talked about one of the problems with the reconciliation model is that we can't just come to the table as equals yet. Part of it is that white people do not have a real understanding of their whiteness (she used some thought experiments, like asking white people to come up with 5 positive things about their race, and thinking about what the difference would be to a person holding a "black is beautiful" sign as opposed to "white is beautiful" or the positive aspects of black pride as opposed to the nasty ones of white pride). Anyway, that ends up being the place where I am interested as a theology student, I think I need to do a better job articulating whiteness. It is often rendered invisible, in that it is the norm that everything else is defined against, and it never takes the time to define itself. So I liked Harvey's talk because in connecting the word resurrection she is offering a hopeful way forward. She thinks that in the consideration of the church's role in our nation's history we might be able to find some redemption and if we are lucky maybe some resurrection.

This is a lot for one blog post. Well anyway, things are good. Things are new. I am new at this.