Some of Your Beeswax!

Have you watched the two-part National Geographic series, Secrets of the Bees. As a "once upon a time" beekeeper I was intrigued and it really is astonishing, particularly the first episode. The team of film-makers worked for three years with the very best of equipment to capture a world unknown to most of us, including the most experienced beekeepers. Even though they focus on the complex society of a honey bee hive they remind us that there roughly 20,000 species and are arguably the most important animal on Earth. They pollinate a third of the food we eat and we might starve without their industry. 

Watching Secrets of the Bees got me searching for the spiritual importance of bees in various cultures and to my surprise I found out that the Christian Easter Vigil Exsultet, the prayer for the worship service the night before Resurrection morning, praises the bees who provide the wax for the large Paschal Candle and therefore the light it provides:

O holy Father, the evening sacrifice of this incense,
which holy Church renders to Thee
by the hands of Thy ministers
in the solemn offering of this wax candle,
made out of the work of bees.

Now also we know the praises of this pillar,
which the shining fire enkindles to the honour of God.
Which fire, although divided into parts,
suffers no loss from its light being borrowed.
For it is nourished by the melting wax,
which the mother bee produced
for the substance of this precious light.

                                           Bee hive design on a Paschal Candle

High praise for the little critters! For several years while in Sudbury a number of  congregations worked together hosting an Easter Vigil service and we used traditional liturgical elements. I don't remember the bees at all and that's because this section was omitted for a time but it is making a comeback in some parishes, deservedly so. 

There is currently an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum called Bees: A Story of Survival and I think I/we must go:

This visually stunning exhibition – created by the National Museums Liverpool with award-winning sculptor Wolfgang Buttress – tells the remarkable story of bee adaptations and survival, as well as their relationship to humans and the natural world. 

Now I need to find out why when I was a lad we would rebuff a nosy person with the curious phrase: "None of your beeswax!" 

"Problem" Women in the Southern Baptist Convention

 

                                                       Messengers at last year's Baptist Convention 

I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, so that you may welcome her in the Lord, as is fitting for the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a benefactor of many and of myself as well.

Greet Prisca and Aquila, my coworkers in Christ Jesus, who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks but also all the churches of the gentiles. Greet also the church in their house. Greet my beloved Epaenetus, who was the first convert in Asia for Christ.  Greet Mary, who has worked very hard for you.  Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Israelites who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.

Romans 16: 1-7 NRSVue

I have to be blunt in saying that some Christian groups are so consistently cruel and in such stark contravention of what I consider the gospel of Christ that I'm almost embarrassed to admit I'm in the same spiritual species. Honestly, I don't think I am, as much as I want to be generous about the "big tent" of Christian faith. 

This has risen to the surface again as the Southern Baptists of the United States prepare to gather Tuesday in Florida for their annual meeting. There they’ll debate for the fourth year in a row whether to formally ban churches with a woman serving in any role resembling that of  pastor — not just the top position in a congregation. The Southern Baptist Convention has become increasingly conservative over the past 50 years and the right-wing of the denomination has pushed out moderates, expelling some of their biggest congregations which have given women positions of leadership. 

This year, an amendment proposed by Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, would exclude any church that acts “to affirm, appoint, or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, specifically preaching to the assembled congregation.” Not long ago Mohler said it would even be a “problem” for a church podcast to include a woman answering questions about that week’s sermon.

There are so many reasons to find this stifling of women to be reprehensible, including the respect the Apostle Paul expressed for female leaders at the conclusion of his letter to the Romans. He goes so far as to describe Phoebe as a deacon and Junia as an apostle.

Another is the level of hypocrisy by a church that covered up hundreds of situations of sexual abuse by male pastors for decades, until the SBC was outed by the investigation by the Houston Chronicle newspaper. 

We have Southern Baptist family members in the States whom we love yet we are baffled by their willingness to stay in this denomination. The women are far from subservient. 

 And we won't get started on the strong support for Trump within the denomination. 

Nature for Healing and Wholeness

                                                   Along the Belleville Waterfront

1 Touch the earth lightly, use the earth gently,

nourish the life of the world in our care:

gift of great wonder, ours to surrender,

trust for the children tomorrow will bear.

4 God of all living, God of all loving,

God of the seedling, the snow and the sun,

teach us, deflect us, Christ reconnect us,

using us gently and making us one.

                                      Voices United 307

 From time to time our son Isaac, pastor at Trenton United Church, asks if I might visit a member of the congregation in Belleville Hospital. I am what the UCC terms a Voluntary Associate Minister with all the appropriate shots and paperwork.

This doesn't happen often because Isaac is a conscientious visitor to his flock but he lives and works half an hour away and we are five minutes from the Belleville Hospital. So. the other day I stopped in on two people, one in their eighties and the other not far off one hundred. Both have demanding medical needs but I was touched by their positive outlooks and determination to get back to church again. They both new me before the visits so we were able to chat openly and pray at the conclusion. 

The person in her late nineties is in a room overlooking the marvelous waterfront trail at the edge of the Bay of Quinte, an arm of Lake Ontario. Ruth and I regularly cycle along this path. We love the vistas but the view from several storeys up is spectacular on a sunny late Spring day. 

As I admired the view I commented that studies have shown that looking out to trees and water contributes to recovery for hospital patients. This charming person, remarkably lucid and engaged, agreed enthusiastically. It was obvious in our conversation that she loves the natural world, including the variety of birds at her home feeders. 

We have come to understand how important it is to encourage children to enjoy the outdoors and what we term Creation in our Christian faith. A friend and former parishioner is an interpreter at a Conservation Area not far away and he has commented on the ways in which kids open up to wonder in that setting. I've met children on the boardwalk there and even though I'm a total stranger they are bursting to share what they have seen and heard. 

Surely this is true throughout the seasons of life. And we should ensure that this is part of the design of our healthcare institutions. The Hospice facility for Quinte has rooms which open onto a green space with sliding patio doors in each room so that patients can experience nature to the very end of their days. 

I figure that Belleville Council should send a photographer to the roof of the hospital for photos to promote the city and this time of greening would be ideal. 

PS: As I write this blog entry the birch trees outside my study window are dancing in the breeze and I getting occasional whiffs of the nearby lilacs. 

Hope for a Trenton Little Forest

A drone view of the Yakama Nation's Healing Forest, which is in the shape of a medicine wheel, in Toppenish, Washington State

Recently  I have seen a number of articles about Little Forests or Pocket Forests or Miyawaki Forests, named after the Japanese botanist who founded the movement in the 1970s. The concept is planting a relatively dense and complementary patch of trees and plants in smaller areas, often in urban settings. One of the studies suggests that these small forests had limited value for reforestation and the outcomes can't be generally verified. But this seems to be missing the point that they are intended to be tucked into places where little else is growing and people are engaged in establishing them. Most of the articles are uplifting. 

Miyawaki worked with Japanese companies, including Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi, offering workshops for employees to teach them how to turn barren land into mature forests. Now there are Little Forests around the globe.

A couple of years ago I attended a Kingston Little Forest Seminar in Napanee and left enthused by the concept. I was a Sunday worship leader at Trenton United a short time later so I focused on the many passages of scripture about trees in the bible, from start to finish, and I shared my Little Forest seminar experience.

Money was raised at Trenton United to purchase specific trees and during last summer's drought a dedicated member nursed them along at her home. Then in the Fall a determined group of organizers and congregation members of all ages from TUC planted a variety of native trees in an area by the Trent River designated by the Conservation Authority.  Ruth and I went to take a look in late April and we were delighted to see that most of them were budding and leafing out. 

There is also a plaque describing what the trees represent and naming Trenton United as a source for the project. I feel that this is an important Christian outreach and witness by the congregation and maybe we need to organize a return group junket to see how our saplings are doing. 

Ecologist Akira Miyawaki developed this planting method to re-create lush native forests preserved in sacred areas near temples and shrines in Japan. He was a scientist (he died in 2021) but there was also a spiritual aspect. Whatever our faith tradition, we can find practical ways to "live with respect in Creation" (UCC New Creed) and see the sacred forest and the trees. 

Wild Saints & Wild Christianity

 

It was roughly 30 years ago that I drove with son Isaac, just emerging as a teen, from Sudbury to Toronto to attend a seminar with the Rev Herbert O'Driscoll. He was an Irish-Canadian Anglican writing regularly in the United Church Observer magazine but we made the trek because he was speaking about Celtic Christianity, a relatively new area of exploration at the time. O'Driscoll had recently published a memoir The Leap of the Deer: Memories of a Celtic Childhood. He was a fine presenter and he had lots to say about the Celtic saints who were known for their love and immersion in the natural world or Creation. 

Through the years I have been fascinated by the legends of these hermits who communed with birds and otters and other creatures. On one level they are highly improbable and on another they remind us that these Christians had adopted the sense of interconnectedness with nature that they took on from the Druids and is also part of our biblical story. 

I see that writer/theologian Paul Kingsnorth, now living in Ireland, is writing The Book of Wild Saints, and I can hardly wait for it to be published. Kingsnorth is an admirer of St. Kevin, one of my favourite Celtic saints as well. Here are a few paragraphs from a piece he wrote for his substack earlier this month. 

Yesterday was the feast day of St Kevin of Glendalough. Kevin, or Coemgen, whose story I told here in April, was one of the Christian wilderness ascetics who I’ve taken to calling ‘wild saints.’ I am fascinated with these people. Why? Well, partly because I think they bring the Christian Way to its purest expression. Partly because their stories are so intriguing and eccentric and sometimes even inexplicable. There’s a deep mystery to them. And finally because I have a strong intuition that they have something important to tell us today.

What could that be? I tried to get at the answer in an essay I wrote last year for First Things magazine, entitled A Wild Christianity. In that essay, I wrote that we are living in what we might call a ‘desert time’: a time of collapse and change and radical reinvention. If that is true, then these old Fathers and Mothers of the desert might have something to tell us about how to live in it:

I feel like I am being firmly pointed, day after day, back toward the green desert that forms my Christian inheritance … Back to the song that is sung quietly through the land by its maker, the song that is in the stream running, in the mist wreathing the crags, the growling of the rooks, the thunder over the mountains. Back to the caves, to the skelligs, to the deserts green and brown … I feel that in another time of crisis and confusion we need to go back to our roots, both literal and spiritual. To flee from the gaze of a civilised centre that denies God and launches salvo after salvo daily against the human soul. To seek out a wild Christianity, which will see us praying for hours in the sea as the otters play around us. To understand—to remember—that the Earth and the world are not the same thing.

In recent years I've come to appreciate Indigenous spirituality and have been humbled by how dismissive colonial culture has been, of this gift, including the Christian church. I do want to rekindle my love of the Celtic saints as well. 

At this time of year we to endeavour to be outside as much as possible, although this year the mosquitoes are not creatures I am willing to embrace as a treasure from the Creator. 

Ebola and Burying the Dead

 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.

 Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. 

                                                      Romans 12: 14-15 NRSVue

I listened to a brave science and medicine reporter for the New York Times describe the circumstances in the region of the DR Congo where the Ebola virus is sickening and killing hundreds and perhaps thousands. There are many issues including lack of medical supplies and isolation. Another is the funeral practices of families who have lost loved ones. Not only to they want to bury the deceased, it is customary for mourners to touch the face of the person, a disaster with a highly infectious disease. It has been very difficult for officials to dissuade families from doing this and conspiracy theories abound. 

We saw how traumatic it was for those who couldn't be with loved ones as they died during the COVID pandemic and funeral gatherings weren't allowed. It seems that this disrupted burial practices here in Canada that we are still experiencing.

I thought about my first pastoral charge in ministry beginning in 1980. I've described it as a Maritime Green Acres because I was the minister from the big city of Toronto arriving at my five preaching points in outport Newfoundland. So much there was different from what I took for granted about religious practice and I was the odd person. God help me when I naively messed with those conventions. 

I was quietly appalled at the custom for mourners to touch the face of a deceased person as the body lay in the casket at the back of the church. Funeral homes were an hour way back then so folks filed in, some of them weeping dramatically, all of them touching the dearly departed. I actually came to respect these customs to a degree even though they were a departure from the stoic funerals and memorials I grew up with. Why wouldn't we weep at the loss of someone who was precious to us? 

We can pray that this Ebola outbreak will be brought under control soon, although it is proving to be a challenge. I suppose we can all ask what customs and observances we would want when we're "promoted to glory." 

Sagrada Familia and LEGO

 

                                                                Lego Sagrada Familia -- Antonio Gaudi 

I have expressed my regret that I will never visit Sagrada Familia Basilica, the astonishing architecture tour de force of Antonio Gaudi. 

Construction work began in 1883  and in February of this year, Sagrada Família became the world's tallest church when a part of its central tower was lifted into place. The official dedication service and ceremony will take place on June 10th. Gaudi was a brilliant architect and a person of deep Christian faith who attended mass almost daily. I've written about the movement to have him recognized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. 

LEGO, the construction toy that has launched untold numbers of profane outbursts by parents who stepped on them has created its own Sagrada Familia masterpiece. The new LEGO Architecture set was announced to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of the renowned architect Antoni Gaudí. At 12,060 pieces, the model surpasses the previous record holder, the LEGO Art World Map, by nearly 500 pieces. You can preorder the set, to be released in November, for a modest $1,100 Canadian. 

I've already teased my six-year-old grandson, a LEGO savant, that it would probably take him the better part of a day to complete this model. I won't offer to purchase it for him so I can't enjoy the basilica vicariously either. 

What an amazing accomplishment stretching across three centuries.