Angela Center

Integrating: spirituality, psychology, social responsibility and the arts

What's New

Reflection for January 15 2006

Calendar

Psychotherapy /      Counseling Services

Conference Facilities

Registration

Contact our Staff

News

AC Press

HOME

Sunday Morning

In his poem called "Sunday Morning" the American poet Wallace Stevens describes a woman who rather than going to church on Sunday prefers to lounge in a sunny chair amid the aroma of late coffee and oranges. And Stevens goes on to say: Shall she not find in comfort of the sun, / In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else / In any balm or beauty of the earth, / Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? Later in the poem we hear her say: "I am content when wakened birds, / Before they fly, test the reality / Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings, / But when birds are gone, and their warm fields / Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"

The language of the poem is delightful to read - but it remains a deliberately pagan piece, for transient though it may be, the woman finds her Sunday morning solace in the beauty of nature alone and no longer in what appears to be the ancient, dour, moralizing monotony of Christianity. And I suppose Christianity is somehow to blame for such a modern return to the worship of awakened birds, windy lakes, echoing hills and sweet berries ripening in the wilderness, for some versions of Christianity can be pretty forbidding, like the TV kind where some stern fellow pounds upon a Bible.

But I think the thing that really does Christianity in is habit. It's been around so long that many people participate in it of a Sunday morning as a reflex. I mean, if I were to ask people why they come to church on Sunday, I suspect I'd get some pretty stock answers. But how many would say, "I come to be processed, to be taken into a process that will send me forth from the portal of my church a changed person, worthy of an entirely new name, awake to God's presence in myself and in my world and therefore even more appreciative of nature than Wallace Stevens' stay-at-home"?

Take today's liturgy and first reading. When I hear that passage about the boy Samuel, I sense the same thing is happening to me. Like Samuel I've been asleep. Indeed, everybody's been asleep, been anesthetized by the media, politics, sick humor and ideologies, rendered unconscious of things that really matter - like faith, hope and love - unconscious of God himself and therefore hardly as conscious of nature as that woman in the poem. But having come to church this morning, I have been awakened like Samuel by a whisper that speaks my name. Of course my spiritual and intellectual slumber has been so deep that I need to prodded three times to figure out: "Hey, this is the Creator of the world speaking to little old me - insisting that I become alert to things, grow up, become by word and behavior an amplification of God's wake up call to all the world."

And so I am processed on into the Gospel reading where I run into John the Baptist, who orients me toward the presence of God's Word made flesh. And so I follow him, only to have him suddenly turn and confront me quite personally and say, "What are you looking for?" And knowing there's something about him, about the kind of world he inhabits that appeals to me, I say, "Where are you staying, what's it like to live like you?" And he says, "COME AND SEE!"

And his invitation draws me right into the Eucharist where I find myself at a banquet table around which invisible generations are gathered and where bread and wine become my magical means of fusion with him and whereby - as with Simon Bar-Jona in today's gospel - I too acquire a new name, a fresh personality, renewed citizenship within the kind of universe Jesus inhabits. And so once again I'm ready to go forth to awaken in people around me an appreciation of life and yes, of nature too at least as potent and so much more hopeful than that of the lady in Stevens' poem.

-- Geoff Wood