cloud of witnesses – Grow Christians

The Larger than Life Ministry of Phillips Brooks

January 23, 2023 by Kit Lonergan

Phillips Brooks and I have little in common except we both have prayed and preached in the same church. And we both lived in Boston. And had experiences as high school teachers (but only he was fired, thank you very much). And my office is in his former house. And he stares at me every time I celebrate the Eucharist.

Born to patrician parents—locally known as the ‘Boston Brahmin’ set—in 1835, Phillips Brooks was the second of five children. Educated at local private schools in Boston, he graduated from Harvard College and went on to teach for a single year at a high school (which, as stated above, went poorly). He sought out mentorship from his former professors, and they suggested he consider ordained ministry as a vocation. Only a few years later, he graduated from seminary in Virginia, was ordained, and ended up serving a parish in Philadelphia.

While Brooks was a less-than-stellar high school teacher, his writing skills were considerable. What he wrote about faith, the life lived in God, and the role of the church gained traction in both parishes he served in Philadelphia. At his first parish, he wrote the lyrics to ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ as a children’s hymn for the church school. By 1865, at the ripe old age of 31, he had become a nationally recognized preacher. He then took a year off from ministry to travel in Europe, returning to accept the position of Rector of Trinity Church in the City of Boston in 1867. He came home.

Brooks is known for two main reasons: his preaching and his vision for a new parish building in a style never seen before, which would become Trinity Church’s Copley Square location. Having outgrown the space for Trinity’s original location in downtown Boston, Brooks began searching outside the ‘regular’ limits of Boston and chose a tract of land in a developing neighborhood just outside the city center. Having purchased the land, he and the congregation received bids for the building project and program, and chose a finalist (H. H. Richardson) who had yet to build anything of this breadth or stature.

Outward and Visible Signs of Friendship

January 12, 2023 by Erin Jean Warde

“No medicine is more valuable, none more efficacious, none better suited to the cure of all our temporal ills than a friend to whom we may turn for consolation in time of trouble, and with whom we may share our happiness in time of joy.” —Saint Aelred

Saint Aelred of Rievaulx is known for his work on spiritual friendship. What a time to be confronted with the idea of spiritual friendship, when friendship might feel like the furthest-away love we are feeling. I can only speak for myself, but I feel challenged by what friendship looks like within the confines of my home. I wonder what friendship feels like for essential workers during this pandemic, as they put themselves at risk to serve, while simultaneously maybe feeling the need to distance themselves from those they love out of love. In so many conditions of this present human life, I feel the weight of how we understand friendship when distance from our friends is the loving way to continue being in friendship with them.

In the quote above, Saint Aelred says there is no better medicine than the gift of spiritual friendship. And yet, for some of us, we wait on this friend-borne medicine as patiently and with as much longing as we wait for a COVID-19 vaccine. In this time of isolation, difference, and a masked reality, may we turn to Jesus and the gift of spiritual friendship that lives inside of our hearts. May we be reminded that the incarnation of Jesus Christ promises that God, embodied in Jesus, knew spiritual friendship in his life, and now knows how to arrive to us in our loneliness. Jesus does not theoretically want to be our friends; Jesus’ incarnation promises that we are beloved by God in this time of trouble, that Jesus cures the temporal illnesses of our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls.

This does not, however, feel on this side of the veil like an instant relief of those ills. Knowing this in my heart, I still stare alone into a screen instead of kneeling beside others at the altar. So, in this specific time, the truth of spiritual friendship looks profoundly temporal.

Ammonius the Hermit

November 8, 2022 by Ryan Kuratko

Have you ever googled someone—or yourself, of course!—only to discover a whole lot of other people, in other countries and states, with the same name?

This can make pre-first-date research somewhat harder, and it’s especially common if we’re looking for someone named Jenny or Robert. Worse, if the person we’re trying to learn about shares a name with someone who once lived in a small town, and in that small town that person had a bad night that involved law enforcement, the whole story is now online. That single bad decision colors everyone of that name online, presumably forever.

Ammonius suffers from this same problem, albeit the 4th century variety. While the various forms of his name haven’t yet seen a resurgence in our era, they were quite common in his day. Several Christian and non-Christian scholars of the period share the name, and at least two of them knew Anthony of the Desert, and so within a hundred years, the various Ammoniuses are being confused with each other by people trying to sort through their teachings.

The Ammonius commemorated today has often had his life confused with someone else, but even this Ammonius largely has life boiled down to anecdotes. Some sources believe he’s most interesting for refusing to be ordained—he cut off his own ear, and threatened to remove his tongue if people didn’t stop trying to ordain him. We’ve all badly wanted to turn down a job we didn’t want, even if we didn’t go to such lengths, so the story makes him immediately relatable. It’s not that different, though, from someone who once stole a pickup on a slow Saturday night to take it joyriding and got caught. Looking up the name gives the story, but neither story tells us much about the person—what Ammonius loved, how he took his coffee, the joy his friends took in seeing him.

Others love the idea that he persuaded his wife to become an ascetic with him, and they each ultimately led separate monastic communities. This suggests not so much an unhappy marriage as a total rejection of the Roman way of life with its coercive family units and cultural requirements. Ammonius is notable in helping create a space for others to do this, too, because his community formed quite early and inspired others to do the same. Yet, this story, dutifully recorded on Wikipedia, tells us very little about him. Did his wife come up with the ascetic thing, and he took credit? Did their love for each other evolve over the years, inspiring one another in their career and vocation? This would be much more revelatory information.

The Profound Act of Showing Up

June 9, 2022 by Maria Kane

Everyone told me that visiting Iona, a small island off of the western coast of Scotland would be a magical, otherworldly experience. Since the 5^th century, when Saint Columba established his monastery and planted the seeds of Christ’s redeeming love in Scotland, Iona has long been regarded as a thin place where the lines of heaven and earth are blurred and glory is as close as the mist rising from the sea.

But after two planes, one train, two ferries, one bus, and an uphill walk in the rain, my arrival to Iona last summer felt anything but transcendent. Weeks earlier, grief had barged into my life and left a gaping wound in its wake. Although my pilgrimage had been two years in the making, I struggled to walk the 50 yards from my inn to the 1,000-year-old abbey for worship each morning with the resident community. I didn’t feel like singing songs of joy. I didn’t feel like sitting next to strangers I didn’t know. I didn’t want to stand and recite a creed I wasn’t sure I still believed.

Alas, it was just my good (mis)fortune that during my first worship service we were asked to turn to our neighbor and share our thoughts on the morning’s scripture. (Do you want to know what an introvert’s worst nightmare is? Being told to turn to someone you don’t know and then engage in a conversation with them.) My closest neighbor happened to be a grandfatherly-type man named Gus. Gus had been seated at the table next to mine both at dinner the night before and breakfast that morning. Leaving breakfast that morning, he introduced himself and said he’d love to talk and hear my story—to which I smiled back and told myself that I ought to come to lunch and dinner at a different time lest I see him, talk to him, and have to listen to some kind of spiritual woo-woo-ness or break down in tears, which I had been prone to doing at the drop of a hat.

Now I was stuck next to Gus in worship. When it was my turn to answer the question all I could do was cry. I pointed to my eyes and said, “welp, this is my answer.” He said nothing, instead put his hand on my knee and left it resting there for the remainder of the service. Rather than standing with the rest of the congregation at the recitation of the creed, he stayed seated with me in solidarity. In between the tears and sadness, a wellspring of tenderness began to push through the shards of pain.

Julian of Norwich: Christ Our Mother

May 8, 2022 by Margaret Ellsworth

If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love. —Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

“My job is to keep you safe.”

This is a common refrain at my house. I say it while grabbing my curious daughter from toddling toward the hot oven, while stepping between kids whose verbal arguments are about to turn physical, over my shoulder in the car when the kids are being loud enough to distract the driver. My job is to keep you safe.

There are days I despair of being able to do this job well. The news is full of war and pandemic and climate chaos; the world my kids are growing into is not a safe one. I can baby-proof the kitchen and drive the speed limit, but the rest of it keeps me up at night. What kind of mother am I if I can’t keep them safe?

This year, Saint Julian’s feast day coincides with Mother’s Day. Julian is well known for being a theological optimist—her most famous saying might make a good Mother’s Day card. What mother doesn’t want to hear that “all shall be well… and all manner of things shall be well”?

But as many of us know, the positive messages of Mother’s Day don’t always transfer to support. Too often, our world likes to sing mothers’ praises and cheer mothers up more than it seeks to support them in the hard work they’ve been given. It’s easy to say “All shall be well” but it’s not always so easy to believe.

Of course, the world Julian was writing in was not a safe one either. She lived through two waves of plague, and the violence and unrest that followed. She survived a paralyzing illness that nearly killed her. And yet even still, her writings are full of confident hope. She doesn’t even mention the chaos of her context; instead she focuses on her connection to Christ.