SeasonalJournal Grace and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church Advent / Christmas / Epiphany Volume 7, No. 1 November 26, 2017 SeasonalJournal Mission: To accept God’s grace and bear witness to His grace in the world. 3 Rector’s Welcome to the Season The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson 4 Editor’s Note: Norwich is Calling in July 2018! Joan Ray 6 Walking the Labyrinth, a Spiritual Pilgrimage Martha de Ulibarri 8 Parenting for the Season: The Wonder of Godly Play Kristin Brown 11 A Call to Live Life God’s Way: An Advent Sermon The Very Rev. Jane Hedges, Dean, Norwich Cathedral 14 Julian of Norwich and Christ as Mother Carol Neel 17 Christianity’s Radical Equality: A Christmas Sermon The Rev. Canon Dr. Peter Doll, Canon Librarian, Norwich Cathedral 19 St. Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures 20 An epiphany for the Magi, but the Epiphany for the Poet: T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” Joan Ray, PhD 24 Becoming a New Kind of People: An Epiphany Sermon The Very Rev. Jane Hedges, Dean, Norwich Cathedral 26 Music of the Season: Norwich Cathedral in our Sights! Concerts of the Season Inside Back Cover: Our Historic Crèche Marianna McJimsey Back Cover: Epiphany: A Celebration of Lights The Seasonal Journal does not receive funds from Grace and St. Stephen’s. The Journal’s tri-annual publication is made possible by a grant from The Episcopal Church Women Thrift House and through the generosity of parishioners. If you’d like to donate to the Journal’s publication costs, please note “Journal” in the memo section of a check made out to GSS Episcopal or on an envelope with cash that says, “Journal Donation.” Grace and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church Rector Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Tejon and Monument Streets (Nave) Curate Rev. Brendan Williams, CSJC 601 N. Tejon St. (Office) Editors Joan Ray Colorado Springs, CO 80903 Vicki Swanson Spellman Tel: (719) 328-1125 Cover Photo Detail Historic Crèche, www.gssepiscopal.org Grace and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church Print/Design RhoDESCO, Colorado Springs, CO Permission to reprint: Every article in this issue of Seasonal Journal is available for use, free of charge, in your diocesan paper, parish newsletter, or on your church website. Please credit Grace and St. Stephen’s Seasonal Journal. Any copyrighted image is so noted. Permission to reprint any copyrighted images must be obtained directly from the artist. Let us know how you’ve used Seasonal Journal by emailing [email protected]. Advent / Christmas / Epiphany Volume 7, No. 1 Rector’s Welcome to the Season Draw Near (by Scott Cairns) [Attend] For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered swoon just shy of apprehension. It was then. far to find. And near is where you’ll very likely see that time’s neat artifice fell in and made for us how far the near obtains. In the dark katholikon [cathedral] a figure for when time would slip free altogether. the lighted candles lent their gold to give the eye I have no sense of what this means to you, so little a more than common sense of what lay flickering sense of what to make of it myself, save one lit glimpse just beyond the ken, and lent the mind a likely of how we live and move, a more expansive sense in Whom. --Scott Cairns (b. 1954) is an American poet. traveled far to touch, see, smell things that seemed to be, upon further review, embedded. This is for me pilgrimage. For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered far to find. I Vacation is different. In a sense vacation takes you away—from life and busy and stress and the chores that seem to order time like how the church seasons keep repeating and keep telling you when to stand and kneel and say, “Alleluia.” But pilgrimage is something other. It does not take you away; it brings you closer to something that is mysteriously both close and hidden. Pilgrimage helps you remember your story. Not your autobiography. Your story. It sets you in context. Like the time I saw my family name scrawled across old Scottish memorials. Or the graves of Anglican priests in cathedral floors. I stood at the grave of St. Jerome (347-420, buried near the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem), and I knew that he had whispered the Word into my ear though I could not tell you when that happened. And the Venerable Bede (673-735, the greatest of all Anglo-Saxon scholars, is buried in Durham Cathedral): he was a teacher though I’ve been only in the presence of his bones. At the Wailing Wall, the Church of the Nativity, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (Jerusalem), and San Clemente al Laterano (The Basilica of St. Clement in Rome), I’ve spilled prayers into a sea of distant echoes, the dead and the living speaking in tongues. I’ve stood in silence, closed my eyes, and knew I was not alone. I’ve walked the steps that Jesus walked and touched the stone that drank his blood and saw the rock that cradled his corpse. And yet he was with me—every step, coursing through my veins, cradling me in his sacred heart. I touched his death and felt him alive. I had seen the pictures. I had read the texts. I had heard the tales. And yet I had to wander far to meet something that was already embedded—deep down, in my DNA, in my heart, in my soul. I have learned that there are pieces of us scattered all over the globe, pieces that we must go to find. Like collectors of a past that is ever present. My wife and I haven’t really traveled much, not once out of the country, since our two sons joined our lives. We needed to take some time, to be grounded, to keep the story going, I suppose. This summer, though, we will join the Taylor Choir on a pilgrimage to England, to haunts of St. Julian of Norwich. I am traveling with the living to commune with the dead. I hope to find something there that is so near I don’t know it is already here, if that makes sense: to gather another scattered piece of me, to slip further into my story. I’m not sure what I will find on my pilgrimage; I’m not even sure what exactly I am looking for. But I know whatever it is, is waiting for me, reaching out from a past that is never truly past, waiting in the golden flicker of revelation, waiting to be found. By Rev. Jeremiah Williamson, Rector Grace and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church Advent / Christmas / Epiphany 2017 3 Editor’s Note Norwich is Calling in July 2018! By Joan Ray, Co-Editor Seasonal Journal etween 16 and 20 July 2018, the voices served as a Benedictine Monastery. Here of our marvelous Taylor Choir will the 6th-century Benedict of Nursia (480- be heard in the historic Romanesque 543) composed The Rules of St. Benedict B(Norman) Norwich Cathedral, one of twelve for monks living in a community under an Heritage sites in the county of Norwich, abbot. Benedict’s Rules are in the motto of the England. To whet your appetite for our visit Benedictine Confederation2: pax (peace) and to Norwich, I invited clergy from Norwich the traditional ora et labora (pray and work). Cathedral, “Dedicated to the Holy and Norwich Cathedral continues the Benedictine Undivided Trinity,” to contribute to this issue ethos in its everyday life through “worship, of the Seasonal Journal. Cathedral clergy and learning, and hospitality.” You can see the staff responded promptly and pleasantly to my Norwich Cathedral Cloister—with pigs, cows, request. Special thanks go to Alison Porter, and many human extras dressed as nuns and PA to the Dean (The Very Rev. Jane Hedges), farmers— in the new film, Tulip Fever. and James Sheldon, the Cathedral’s Marketing Norwich is a walkable, charming medieval Manager, for their friendly assistance. city. I first became really aware of it when I Norwich Cathedral, built over 900 years ago read Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of (1096-1146), is meant “to inspire by its sheer Norwich (c. 1342- c. 1416); it is the first size and magnificence”1: the Cathedral Close book written in English (c. 1395) by a female. (enclosed area around a cathedral) is the largest Parishioner Carol Neel, PhD., Professor of in England and one of the largest in Europe. History (Colorado College), who specializes The Cathedral’s cloisters are the second largest in the European Middle Ages, kindly accepted in England, exceeded only by the cloisters of my invitation to write about Julian of Norwich Salisbury Cathedral. Norwich’s spire at 315 in this journal issue. feet is the second tallest in England. The Greek Located in Norwich is The Julian Centre, next word cathedra, the root of cathedral, means door to St. Julian’s Church (Anglo-Catholic) in the seat of the bishop; the Bishop’s Palace is Norwich. 3 The center’s website explains, “We adjacent to the Cathedral. do not know Julian’s actual name but her name During the Cathedral’s first 450 years, it is taken from St. Julian’s Church (where Julian’s 4 SeasonalJournal cell is located) in Norwich where she lived as ___________________________________ an anchoress for most of her life.” Her original Endnotes cell, largely damaged by bombing in WW II, 1 Norwich Cathedral’s informative website is http:// was rebuilt.