Reconciliation: The Gift of Visiting

Holy Trinity Episcopal Church

Fayetteville, North Carolina

My body is definitely still on Italy time! I keep waking up at 1 am thinking it is time to get up. Little by little the jet lag is beginning to clear. I am now in the Christmas mode and that's good. I will leave this part of North Carolina to go "home" to the mountains for Christmas. I have loved visiting here in Fayetteville and seeing the new sanctuary at Holy Trinity pictured above. The labyrinth in the floor of the church is wonderful and the windows give the feel of being outdoors.

I've spent time just "visiting" with wonderful friends here. Catching up on what is happening in the lives of the people who are part of God's family and mine in this place makes me feel old! But it also makes me extraordinarily grateful for God's grace. I came to Holy Trinity in 1992 with many doubts about myself and ministry. The people of this parish were a healing presence to me and they "loved" me back into ministry.

I've been reading selections from the book, I Have Called You Friends: Reflections on Reconciliation. It was written in honor of Frank Griswold, our previous Presiding Bishop in the Episcopal Church, and it is a collection of writings by notable people. In her reflection, called "Taste and See," Ellen F. Davis talks about gratitude. This is a portion of what she writes in a meditation about Psalm 34:

"An Arabic proverb sums up all human experience thus:

One day for you, one day against you.

A well-known religious teaching amplifies the proverb:

When time is for you, give thanks to God.

And when it is against you, have patience, endure.

That wisdom comes from seventh - century Arabia, but it might as well have come from ancient Israel, because it exactly captures the thought of our psalm. In the terms of the Arabic proverb, the psalmist is speaking on a good day, when things are for him. So he begins by giving thanks to God :

I will bless YHWH at all times

his praise shall ever be in my mouth. (Psalm 34:2)

I am spending time with these words because it is so easy to make the "days that are against us" all about us...or all about someone else! The truth is that if we live long enough some days will "be against us." Some days will simply not go well. What we choose to do with the days that are against us is important. Praising God may come at the end of a long reflection about life's hard days. One of the other reflections in this book is written by Desmond Tutu. He writes about Nelson Mandela. Mandela's 27 years in prison on Robben Island could have strangled him with bitterness. Instead he chose to fill his life with forgiveness. He invited his white South African jailer to be a VIP guest at his Presidential inauguration. His witness of forgiveness advanced the cause of reconciliation. Like St. Francis of Assisi he let his actions speak louder than any sermon or speech could ever speak. And so perhaps the essence of reconciliation is found in what we fill our lives with on even the days that are against us.