I'm currently writing a kind of spiritual memoir. Not sure if I'll finish it or even publish it. But this felt like a section worth sharing here. For context, starting at age 10 I was involved with the audio visual crew at the large Baptist church where I grew up. I ran sound boards and other such equipment. This story comes out of that work. —Charles

One of the major events of our year was “the Singing Cross.” So, like several Baptist churches of a certain size, we had a Christmastime play and choral performance known as the “Singing Christmas Tree” which involved the choir dressing up in like colonial-era costumes, positioning themselves inside an enormous multi-story Christmas tree built on the stage area of the church, singing various Christmas carols and hymns while actors (church volunteers) re-enacted the Nativity story. As far as I know, the First Baptist Church of Pine Hills was the only church to apply this same concept to an Easter-time performance that featured a set of wooden risers built into an enormous cross that dominated the stage. Flanking it on either side were sets built to look like an ancient Middle-Eastern town and house interior on one side and the tomb and Calvary of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial on the other.

It was very elaborate. And a tad corny. The choir would wear former bed-sheets turned into Biblical costume, singing medleys and hymns while actors (church volunteers) performed a Passion Play. While the roles of Jesus and Pilate and Mary Magdalene were generally fixed (because the latter two were singing parts, but Jesus was played by a guy who happened to look a lot like the Caucasian images of Jesus one sees; he was one of the only people allowed to have a beard in our church), the other roles were sought after. I kind of always wanted to be one of the performers (I liked the Roman soldier costumes), but because I was one of the “Sound Guys” I always had backstage duty.

When I was around 17, I had been given a bit of a promotion for this performance: I was to be in charge of lighting. The cross itself was trimmed in rope lights and there were lights for the various sets on the stage. My job was to be positioned underneath the cross and run a box. I’d wear a headset and Ed would call out my cues and I’d hit the requisite switches to adjust the lights according to what was happening.

The area under the cross was cozy. It looked like the area underneath bleachers or an unfinished basement with wooden beams all around. Above me were the stepped platforms that our 100-member choir would be occupying during the performance. The wood would creak and crack from the weight, the same sounds as if someone is working on your roof. I had a little puka at the transept area of the cross where I would sit. I pretended that I was in a space ship, receiving commands from mission control in my headset. We had a week of rehearsals and I got very comfortable in my little capsule, the cues becoming second nature.

Day of the first performance I bring my mom backstage to show her everything and to show her where I’d be stationed. My mother is a bit… let’s say “overprotective.” Since I was an only child she worried and fretted over lots of things. I could tell she was uneasy seeing where I was. Are you safe? was the question in her eyes.

Around that time my friend Eric showed up. He was playing one of the thieves crucified next to Jesus, the one who didn’t have any lines. He was 6’2”, lean, and wearing only a white cloth around his waist. He looked around the underside of the cross and said “I wonder what would happen if this collapsed?” My mom’s eyes widened.

Thanks, Eric.

The show was about to begin. The lights dropped, Eric returned to his area off-stage and my mom joined my grandparents in our usual balcony front-row pew. I tucked into my space, donned my headset, and waited for my cue.

The beginning of the performance left me with little to do. There was some narration and then the choir would be processing in and making their way up and into the cross. Once the lights were set for that section, there was a stretch where I had nothing to do but listen. I began to lay down, which had me going long-wise to the cross, my head underneath the stage-right section. But I worried that I might fall asleep and miss my cues, botching the first night of the performance. So I sat up, leaned forward, and cupped my hands to the headset, listening to the music. I could hear the creaks and cracks of Biblically-dressed bodies ascending the hard wood of the cross.

Then there was a different sound. Deep. I felt shaking.

I opened my eyes and instinctively looked to my right, where I had laid my head moments ago. It was there that I saw a mess of splintered wood and a pile of polyester Bible robes writhing around. One guy was dangling from above, holding on to dear life. Not sure if the whole thing was coming down or not, I threw off my headset and ran out from under the cross, stage-left. The side door was blocked by a plywood representation of the Upper Room. There was a gap between that and the cross. I saw a sea of stunned faces. I was about to head out when I heard my boss Ed’s mantra in my head, the mantra of all stage-hands: You are not to be seen. So I went back toward the cross. But there was no getting through the moaning disoriented mass. I decided that Ed’s words did not apply here and so began to make my way toward the stage.

That’s when I heard it. When everyone heard it. What would become a sort of meme that followed me for years and still makes the occasional appearance when I’m around old church friends.

Sharon had stopped playing the organ by the time I made my way to the stage. She was a consummate professional and had continued playing even as maybe thirty people vanished into a cruciform void before her eyes, as she tried to process the event as it transpired. It so happened that we had a camera trained on her at this moment. We recorded the Singing Cross every year and sold tapes of it. The footage of Sharon playing through disaster lives forever in my mind. But even Sharon knew that the performance was over and quit playing, leaving behind the sheerest silence I have ever heard in my life. Interrupted by a single voice, shrill and panicked.

The voice of my mother.

Most people know me as Charles. In school I was Chuck. But at home, to my grandparents and my mother, I was Chuckie. It was this name, screamed out from some primal maternal space within my mother, a scream that still echoes somewhere in the cosmos, emitted from the corner of Pine Hills Road and Powers Drive, that resonated the cavernous silent space that was the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church of Pine Hills.

She stretched out the vowels to their auditory conclusions. That night, the name Chuckie both died and was born anew.

I ran to center stage. To my surprise my mother was already making her way there. I thought she had lept off the balcony. She did not. But she did later admit she considered doing so. I reached out for her, she hugged me then grabbed my hand, squeezing it with adrenaline and making me understand those stories of mothers lifting cars to grab infants from underneath them. The only person who made it down as quickly as her was my grandfather. He was “Chuck.” I’m named after him, receiving the diminutive version of my name only as a matter of clarity and convenience in my family.

“Daddy!” my mother said. “I’ve got him.”

I don’t know if this is accurate, but the image I have of my grandfather from this moment is of him standing next to the pile of fallen choir members. He’s using a wide-leg stance and is holding a Bible robed choir member by the back of their collar and the back of their rope belt, chucking them to the side in a manner fitting of his name as he tried to get to what he believed was his grandson buried under the rubble.

My mother yanked me out the side door, sat me down on a curb outside and demanded that I tell her I was okay.

“I’m okay.”

She was shaking and crying. I can’t blame her. I had just been inches from death. The section of the cross that collapsed was maybe two feet next to me. Had I laid down my kids would not be currently arguing about video games in the next room.

Amazingly, no one died. Some broken bones though. 911 was called. The news showed up. They reported that a large “crucifix” had collapsed. This irritated me at the time, but now I wonder if wasn’t accurate in a way. After all, there were bodies on that cross.

The next day I arrived at the church to help salvage what we could. It was there that we learned what caused the collapse. The cross was kept in storage and reused every year, reassembled according to instructions. Someone had put on a brace backward and so drilled a new hole into it to make it fit. This single hole affected the structural integrity enough to cause a collapse, even though it had been fine for all the rehearsals in the days prior.

The church decided that the show must go on. The choir, of course, did not return to the cross. But it remained on stage for the remaining performances. Empty, broken, a string of lights dangling into the chasm on the left-hand side when viewed from the pews. All the result of a single mistake that compounded. This would turn out to be evocative of things to come, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Jesus #Church #Anglican #Episcopalian #Christian #Baptist #Orlando #Florida

Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, a pretty substantial observance in the Christian world related to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

It is observed on March 25 because it is nine months away from Christmas, which underscores its traditional importance: the Feast of the Annunciation is associated with the Incarnation.

One of my acquaintances from seminary once posted on social media that Christmas is not the “Feast of the Incarnation,” rather the Annunciation is. Because, according to tradition, this is the day that Our Lady, Saint Mary, conceived Jesus—the day that He first took on human flesh, incarnate as God in the womb.

I like this reminder for a variety of reasons (not least my own particular “pro-life” leanings that I seldom talk about; the New Wave Feminists are probably the closest articulation to my convictions on this subject, if you must know). What a powerful notion, that God dwelt in the womb of a woman for nine months and some change. This is even more theologically rich when we consider the traditional Jewish belief that a fetus is not its own life while still in the womb, meaning that Mary herself (for a time) actively participated in the Incarnation of God.

However, I have a bit of a nit to pick with all of this: I’m not convinced that the Annunciation is when the Incarnation happened.

The Church has long observed two key feast days related to Our Lady’s pregnancy: the Annunciation and the Feast of the Visitation. The former recounts the time the Archangel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would be the mother of God; the latter is the story of when Mary visited her cousin, Saint Elizabeth (who herself was already pregnant with Saint John the Baptist), and both recognized Mary as the mother of God and the incarnation of God taking place in her womb.

Both stories are recorded in Saint Luke’s gospel. Now, Luke is a very detailed evangelist (that is, gospel writer). Of all the known gospels, his has the most historical detail. The tradition is that he traveled around and interviewed the surviving disciples of Jesus, while also reviewing other written materials (like, perhaps, Saint Mark’s gospel), in order to give a fuller account of the life of Jesus. As a result, Luke’s gospel is the only one that contains an actual birth narrative for Jesus; it’s also the only one that gives us any real details of Saint Mary. Saint Matthew’s gospel focuses a bit on Saint Joseph (Mary’s husband), but the actual birth of Jesus is merely referenced, not told.

This is all to say that Luke has an eye for detail and tries to give us as much detail as he can. All the major events of the life of Jesus have an actual story in Luke’s gospel. If the Annunciation is meant to be the story of Jesus’ conception, it’s an odd way of telling it because it seems to happen “off camera.”

Take a look:

God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a city in Galilee, to a virgin who was engaged to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David’s house. The virgin’s name was Mary. When the angel came to her, he said, “Rejoice, favored one! The Lord is with you!” She was confused by these words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. The angel said, “Don’t be afraid, Mary. God is honoring you. Look! You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great and he will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of David his father. He will rule over Jacob’s house forever, and there will be no end to his kingdom.”

Then Mary said to the angel, “How will this happen since I haven’t had sexual relations with a man?”

The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come over you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the one who is to be born will be holy. He will be called God’s Son. Look, even in her old age, your relative Elizabeth has conceived a son. This woman who was labeled ‘unable to conceive’ is now six months pregnant. Nothing is impossible for God.”

Then Mary said, “I am the Lord’s servant. Let it be with me just as you have said.” Then the angel left her. (Luke 1:26-38, Common English Bible)

Notice that the language is all in the future-tense. It’s the language of expectation. So, right off the bat we can see that, based solely on the text of the Bible itself, the Annunciation does not capture the when of Jesus’ conception.

The next thing to happen in the story is that Mary up and leaves to see Elizabeth, where Elizabeth notes that her baby (the fetal Saint John) “leaps” in her womb at the sound of Mary’s voice. Modern English translations tend to phrase Elizabeth’s greeting to Mary like this: “God has blessed you above all women, and he has blessed the child you carry.” (Luke 1:42, Common English Bible) So, if we follow the tenses of the language we’ve been given, we are led to believe that somewhere between Saint Gabriel’s announcing and Saint Elizabeth’s greeting is when Mary became pregnant. Again, the Annunciation is not the place where the conception of Jesus takes place.

Now, Elizabeth’s greeting is elsewhere enshrined in one of the most beloved prayers in Christianity, the “Hail Mary:”

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. (emphasis mine)

This is actually the literal translation of the Greek words. Why English translations don’t like using figurative language anymore is a topic for another time, but this phrasing does not necessarily imply that Mary is currently pregnant since “fruit of the womb” is not necessarily tied to time the way “the child you carry” is.

So here’s my assertion: it is during the Visitation that Mary conceives Jesus. I base this entirely on the language of the gospel text and what we know of Saint Luke. As already noted, it would seem out of character for Luke to include such foreshadowing language from Gabriel and not give us the pay-off. But I do believe he gives us the pay-off.

Look back to what Gabriel says to Mary when she asks “How will this happen?”

The Holy Spirit will come over you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.

Luke uses similar language in the first chapter of Acts. In the midst of the risen Jesus giving instructions to His disciples as He is preparing to ascend into Heaven, he tells them:

You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. (Acts 1:8 Common English Bible)

In the very next chapter this is fulfilled when tongues of flame alight on the heads of the disciples and they begin to speak in different language, filled with spiritual ecstasy.

So, let’s look again at Mary’s story. She’s been told that she will become a virgin mother, the Mother of God; the sign for this will be when the Holy Spirit comes over her and she is overshadowed by the power of the Most High—language quite evocative of what Luke says about Pentecost in Acts.

Now, consider what happens after Elizabeth’s greeting. We’re told the Holy Spirit has filled Elizabeth, herself uttering an ecstatic proclamation, recalled in that first half of the Hail Mary prayer. So the Spirit is present and what does Mary do? She has an ecstatic Spirit-filled proclamation herself.

We call it the Magnificat.

It is my conviction that the Magnificat is intended by Saint Luke to evoke the moment that Mary conceives Jesus. I also think that it is no coincidence that he has this happen at a moment where there are only two women present, perhaps underscoring the miraculous nature of this. There’s no man to be found, or even suggested (as some like the heretical bishop, the late John Shelby Spong might, with his assertion that Mary was raped, perhaps by a man named Gabriel, and that this is the church’s way of trying to turn tragedy into triumph). Rather, God enters our world in the presence of two women, both enraptured by the Holy Spirit.

So, if this is the case, what are we celebrating today? Why bother with the Annunciation?

Because the Annunciation is still good news. It’s the good news that our sins have not left us abandoned. God still chooses to be born among us, even knowing our wickedness. It is the good news that God has chosen a poor young woman to be the one from which God will take on our flesh. Not a person of wealth and power and influence. But someone of meager means, marginal and innocent.

Today we hear the good news that God refuses to be separate from us.

I think of this old tweet every year on this day. Credit to OP

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Jesus #Church #Anglican #Episcopalian #Catholic #Christian #Bible #Mary

Somewhere, long ago, I read someone note the distinction between American and Japanese giant monster movies: American giant monsters climb on buildings whereas Japanese ones walk through them.

I was just exposed, via Mastodon, to this article about the current wave of popularity kaiju are receiving (kaiju is the Japanese term for “monsters,” often used to denote daikaiju, or “giant monsters,” those specifically cut from a similar cloth to Godzilla). Which got me thinking about the genre itself and why I think it’s managed to become mainstream in the US. And which brought the above quote to mind.

A little background: I’ve been a Godzilla fan since I was maybe four. I had an obsession with dinosaurs and my mom grabbed a bunch of discount VHS from a bin at K-Mart that included 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla and 1975’s The Terror of Mechagodzilla. My first memory of a film moving me to tears is from the former, where I openly wept to my mother that Godzilla lost to Kong (and established a life-long disdain for the giant monkey). The latter film remains one of my favorites. Tomoko Ai’s Katsura Mifune still makes me swoon and Titanosaurus remains my favorite non-Godzilla monster—I have an almost Mel-Gibson-in-Conspiracy-Theory compulsion to purchase Titanosaurus toys whenever I see one, likely owing to my disappointment over not being able to find one at Toys-R-Us as a child.

Which sort of leads me to my next point: Godzilla faltered in popularity in the US until 2014. I rediscovered Godzilla by accident while at an enormous toy show in Orlando in 1995 when I found myself face to face with a GIANT poster for Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla and, slack-jawed, I asked the dude selling the merch “they still make Godzilla movies?”

I came across G-Fan magazine shortly thereafter, sitting on a shelf at Sci-Fi World, a collectibles shop on International Drive in Orlando (it happened to be the first glossy cover issue). From those two moments I became a die-hard Godzilla fan. My middle-school friend Paul was the only other person I knew who liked Godzilla. My best-friend, Josh, did not share in my interest (one of the only interests we did not share). Godzilla was truly “mine”—but this also made me feel kind of weird. No one else knew about it and so I kind of had to keep it low-key.

Being a Godzilla fan in those days involved a degree of piracy. Toho, the company who produced Godzilla films, refused to distribute to the US. So, in order to see any of the films after Godzilla 1985 I had to track down bootleg VHS. My first viewing of Godzilla vs. Destroyer (see NOTE at end) was on a VHS made by a straight up Sony Handicam held in the theater. It wasn’t until the 2000s that I ever saw Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla or Godzilla vs. Destroyer with English subtitles (G-Fan always ran plot synopses of new releases for just the reason). Godzilla toys had to be imported—Central Florida was not a hot-spot of Godzilla collectibles at the time and so I made an annual pilgrimage to Sideshow Collectibles outside of Atlanta, Georgia when we’d visit family (I still have their Godzilla collectibles guide, which I had Sean Linkenbeck, the author and shop owner, sign). It was a small miracle that the Trendmasters toy company released a line of US-made Godzilla toys at the time (but they never got around to making a Titanosaurus, natch).

This is all to say that being a Godzilla fan in those days was super niche and super nerdy. Then 1998 happened.

This was the year that Godzilla was getting an official, big-budget Hollywood adaptation. It was, pretty famously, terrible. But the film’s terribleness inspired Toho to make “real” Godzilla films again, starting a new series (the Millennium series), including a US theatrical release of Godzilla 2000. It did not do well. But thanks to the agreement with Sony over the 1998 film, the 1990s and 2000s Godzilla films did get DVD releases, finally.

But Godzilla remained a kind of joke. “Dude in a rubber suit.” Kids stuff. No one in the US was making actual giant monster films, even though the technology existed to do so and even though “nerd” properties were making bank at the box-office. It wouldn’t be until 2014 that we’d get a “proper” US-made Godzilla film, one that treated the monster with respect and awe.

What changed?

Here’s my theory: the US could not appreciate Godzilla—or kaiju in general—until we’d experienced the destruction of one of our iconic cities.

See, Godzilla was born out of the rubble and fires of postwar Japan. Godzilla is punishment for war. In some ways he embodies the guilt that some in Japan feel over their involvement in WWII, in others he is an incarnation of the US’ use of nuclear weapons, in others he is a kind of kami (a sort of god) awakened to punish humanity. Godzilla has a few different origin stories, but the most common is that he is some kind of dormant prehistoric creature awakened by the use of nuclear weapons. He’s only here because of the kinds of weapons we’ve built, an embodiment of our capacity to destroy.

Japan is a place that knows destruction well. The place is geologically active and also prone to typhoons. Traditional Japanese construction techniques are rooted in things falling apart and being rebuilt. My personal theory is that Japanese religion embraced zen the way it did because it spoke powerfully to the Japanese experience: all things are temporary.

The United States, on the other hand, is rooted in triumphalist attitudes. We’ve long employed the language of Rome (“the eternal city”) in our rhetoric, filtering it through (Protestant) Christian imagery. During the economic booms of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan referred to the United States in eschatological terms, calling us the “shining city on a hill”—heaven adjacent language that would have caused Saint Augustine’s eye to twitch. As a result, we tend to fetishize our cities and treat them as eternal.

King Kong climbs the Chrysler building. Godzilla destroys Tokyo Tower.

In the 1998 American film, Godzilla climbs the Empire State building. The only previous example of Godzilla being in the US was in 1966’s Destroy All Monsters (a Japanese-made film), where he destroys the UN building.

So, America depicts its buildings as eternal, resilient. Japan understands better.

We wouldn’t learn this lesson until the morning of September 11, 2001. I watched the North and South towers of the World Trade Center collapse on live television and, I have to confess, I immediately made Godzilla comparisons in my mind.

It took us a few years, but the United States got its first proper kaiju in 2008, with the film Cloverfield. In the same way that 1954’s Gojira (which would be re-branded a year later in the US as Godzilla: King of the Monsters) employed the imagery of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the burning of Tokyo in order to help process the horrors of what had happened, Cloverfield would do the same with the terrorist attacks. Clover is as close to a true “American” equivalent to Godzilla that we’re likely to get.

It’s telling that only six years later we’d finally get a US Godzilla film that sees Godzilla destroy a US city (even if he’s kinda sorta the hero—I personally love the ambivalence that Gareth Edwards gives Godzilla in that film). And this after Pacific Rim primed the pump.

It’s only now that US audiences can appreciate Godzilla because Godzilla exposes something that we intrinsically know, but tend to not articulate: our cities are not buildings, but people. The resilience of places like New York come about as a result of New Yorkers themselves, not the quality of the buildings that make up the skyline.

While Godzilla is connected to nuclear war, at heart Godzilla is a force of nature. 2016’s Shin Godzilla employed the imagery of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami (while also satirizing the government’s response to these things), which helps us recall this fact. 2014’s Godzilla captured the sense of hopelessness a triumphalist West feels when confronted with the fact that there are forces beyond our ability to control. Both it and its sequel, 2018’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, use the imagery and backdrop of climate change (resulting from governmental and corporate meddling) to express how many of us feel in the face of such drastic change. The resulting “Monsterverse” films and shows are about humanity adapting to a new normal, a radically changed world where we are more subjects to nature than its dominants.

I was reminded of this kind of resilience just the other day. We here in Hawai’i experienced a strong storm system, what we know as a Kona Low. It knocked out power across much of O’ahu. As a result, in the midst of wind and rain, I had to acquire food for my family and so I drove on dark streets. I was not the only one. And I was struck by the general sense of togetherness we all felt. Folks were courteous at traffic stops. At the grocery store (which was running on generators), people were orderly and helpful. We were resilient.

We in the West now know that our buildings will tumble, that nature will reclaim her home. We are not masters of creation—we are stewards, at best; mostly we are subjects. There are monstrous forces at work and at battle all around us. But we are at our best when we confront these realities together, survive them together.

We can appreciate Godzilla now because we understand Godzilla now.

***

POST SCRIPT

2016’s Shin Godzilla ends on a much-discussed shot: the camera pans closer and closer to Godzilla, rendered inert through a complicated chemical process. The final shot is of the tip of Godzilla’s tail, where humanoid/Godzilla skeletons are frozen in the midst of emergence. For folks who know the work of Hideaki Anno (of Evangelion fame, who wrote and co-directed the film), this is the kind of thought-provoking teaser that will bug fans for years to come.

Somewhere along the way I read a theory about this that I love. Throughout the film, Godzilla is seen as adapting to whatever humans throw at it. What defeats Godzilla in the end is the co-operative work of a group of people. The theory is that Godzilla recognizes this and was about to evolve into a group himself.

And therein lies the theme: our resilience, our resistance, comes about from us working together. Despite the grand things we’ve built, in the end we will only survive by working together.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

(NOTE: yes, I know that, due to trademarking issues, the technical name of the movie is Godzilla vs. Destoroyah but I’ve long considered that silly)

#Godzilla #Film #Philosophy #Culture #Monsters

Surfing saved my life.

That’s an over-dramatic way of putting it. Perhaps the more accurate thing to say is that surfing has played an integral role in the working out of my salvation, a grace from God that helps me better understand His grace overall. But saying “surfing saved my life” grabs one’s attention a little bit better.

I’d grown up a skateboarder, starting in the summer of 1996, which put me adjacent to surfing. Over the next four years or so, I’d be in surfing’s orbit in some form or another—either by being in stores that sold clothing and accessories related to both or because my youth pastor, who taught me a lot about skateboarding, was also a surfer and was trying to get me and my best friend to join him some Saturday.

My mom was not a beach person. So I seldom saw the ocean growing up. We lived in Orlando, which meant a trip to the beach would have been an event (at least an hour’s worth of driving each way). But I was very much into things like snorkeling and SCUBA. My first ever job was at a pet store that specialized in fish and I became borderline obsessed with the little critters to the point that I briefly considered ichthyology as a career. Which is all to say that I had a sort of hunger for the sea.

***

I’ve written about it before, but I was a kind of misfit kid. I didn’t really fit in with a lot of people, except my best friend and his little brother (who were practically family to me). I was too “Christian” for a lot of the cool kids at my school (even though it was a Baptist school), but also too alternative and grungy for the youth group set at the time. I fought with school administrators almost every day and openly rebelled against much of the fundamentalist elements in our church. I got really good at “code-switching” when around certain groups, only really feeling like myself when I was with friends or alone at home.

During my junior year of high school (second-to-last year before graduation, for those readers who might have a different school system) I got kinda tired of fighting with everyone. I watched Office Space for the first time and it opened my mind to a completely different way of thinking: not giving a shit. I decided to just do what I wanted to do. And I decided, after winter break, that I wanted to play baseball.

I worked hard. I carried a baseball with me everywhere like I was Pistol Pete and his basketball. I was throwing and catching after school, going to batting cages. I was hitting solid line drives off the 90 MPH pitching machine. But, I did not make the cut. I have my suspicions about this (my mom worked for the church of which my school was parochial and there had been long-simmering tensions between the two institutions; none of the church staff kids were picked that year). Regardless, this turned out to be a God-send because one day I was skating at the church and my best friend shows up and tells me that he and Eddy (our youth pastor) had gone surfing together and that it was awesome. He told me “my dad is going to take us to the beach tomorrow, you should come.”

That day would have been the date of my first baseball game had I made the team.

We drove to New Smyrna Beach, rented long boards, and waded out into the freezing cold water. I was in a wetsuit (I was taking SCUBA lessons as part of a Marine Biology class, so had acquired one as part of this, thankfully). I don’t remember much about the conditions. All I remember was taking the board to the white water and trying to catch whatever was breaking. New Smyrna, at high tide, has a long flat section of shallow water (which makes it ideal for kids playing at the beach and why it’s a popular family spot) and so I was pushing off the sand and into white water.

I’ll never forget standing up for the first time. The wave was maybe shin-high, and I was basically going straight toward the beach. But the speed and the simple fact that I was being moved by a small amount of water shifted something deep in my mind. I wound up getting hit by my board later that day, which also left an impression (both literally and figuratively):

there was something much bigger than me out there.

***

I was an angry kid. Apparently this is not uncommon for young men who grow up without fathers. My dad left my mom as soon as he found out she was pregnant with me and I never met the man (he died in July of last year). I don’t consider myself someone with “daddy issues” or whatever. But I do agree with something Donald Miller writes about in his book for guys who grow up without dads, entitled To Own A Dragon, where he notes that fathers (or father-figures) are key in helping young men learn to channel their aggressions and frustrations. We have a lot of testosterone, which is necessary for our development, and it begins to mess with us in our teenage to young adult years. Someone who’s been through it can help us navigate the path. I did not have that person.

I had a bunch of anger pent up and I took it out on authority figures, or on people that I felt were hypocritical. It often felt like the world was out to get me somehow. Plus, I was smart in a way that didn’t quite fit with my Baptist school environment (I excelled in creative pursuits; I was also quite good in history and Bible, which did afford me some accolades, but I hated doing homework and so my grades did not reflect, to the school’s eyes, my abilities). I was a self-centered little snot who thought he was smarter and better than everyone else around him. I did not realize it at the time, but I needed to get my ass kicked around a bit, on a kind of spiritual level.

***

One of my favorite surfing stories, one that has woven itself into the fabric of our shared mythology, is the story of Greg Noll’s last wave. The short version of the story is this: during an immense swell that hit the Hawaiian islands during the winter of 1969, Noll paddled out at Makaha (in defiance of law enforcement) and caught what people have said was the largest wave surfed at the time. Noll, known for his bombastic nature, allowed the size of the wave to get bigger in the retelling: first 50 feet, then 70, and so on. Regardless of the size, what’s true is that Greg Noll caught this wave, came in, loaded his board onto the roof of his car, and never surfed again. He continued to shape surfboards and be part of the industry. But he never paddled out again.

There are numerous interviews about this. The reason Noll gives for quitting surfing was that he had reached a point in life where, in his own words, he was begging God to send him a wave that he could not ride. He challenged God and God answered. He said that that wave humbled him and made him realize that he could not continue down this path anymore. Surfing was going to kill him because he did not know how or when to stop. Until that wave made that decision for him.

I love this story because it feels true to my situation. For Greg Noll, it took an eternally-growing wave to put him in his place. For me, it took an ankle-high roller.

I learned from that tiny wave that I was not the center of the universe. I would come to learn that I am a recipient of God’s grace, surfing the waves He sends.

***

That day of surfing set me on my path. I caught a wave that I’m still riding. If not for surfing, I would not be who and where I am today. Surfing would teach me about humility and God’s grace. It would also become a deciding factor in where I went to college, which would put me right in front of the Episcopal parish that would reignite my Christian faith after a few years of faltering. This would, of course, lead to my call to the ordained priesthood. It would also predispose me toward Hawai’i, the birthplace of surfing.

It was in March of 2000 that I first surfed. And it was in March of 2020 that I would begin my life in Hawai’i. There is a fairly straight line between those two points.

Had I remained an angry young man, I might’ve gone down a similar path as my dad. But God had other plans in mind.

So, yeah, surfing saved my life.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

NOTE: The header photo is the only known close-up photo I have of myself surfing. It was taken by my friend Kurt probably in the summer of 2004 when I lived in Fort Pierce Florida. I’m surfing a kinda busted Yater Spoon that I bought on the cheap from Spunky’s Surfshop, a board that would also play an important role in my spiritual life, which I’ll write about some other time.

#Surfing #Spirituality #Christianity #Jesus #Theology

Today, the traffic sucked. I was finishing coffee at home when my wife warned me. So I wound up deciding to work from home. While doing something on the computer, saw that Hackers was playing on YouTube. So, of course I watched it.

Unironically, Hackers is one of my favorite movies. I only ever caught it on rental from Blockbuster back in the day and have watched it many times since. It was among the first movies that would expose me to a kind of culture that could be considered Queer and “woke.” Even though I was hard-wired as a fundamentalist at the time of my viewing, Hackers sorta dented the shell and began to nudge me into a direction of tolerance. Further, it played a big role in making me into a reader. Matthew Lillard’s character, Cereal Killer, alludes to 1984 and there’s a classic scene where he’s showcasing a bunch of the books used for networking standards and Dade (Johnny Lee Miller’s character) is listing off the vernacular titles to the impressive nods of the other characters (Phreak and Joey). Then there’s the scene in the Advanced English class where Dade shares a (mis)quote of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” I wanted to be like that. I wanted to be seen as cool, but also smart and well-read. But I digress.

What struck me about this viewing of Hackers was how prescient it could be. Yes, it is a film about computer hacking that is made for movie audiences in 1995—which is to say, a time where “average” people thought computers were still mystery machines full of bewildering power on a par with magic. The depiction of super-computers and that hilarious and user-hostile interface on the “Gibson” are corny and comical. But the heart of that movie is in the right place, much like how Point Break gets the spirit of surfing better than most Hollywood films about the sport do. And, as such, the film depicts an intellectual divide among computer nerds that is today coming to fruition.

In one corner we have The Plague, played by Fischer Stevens. There is a suggestion that he’s a bit of a sell-out, a hacker who got a job running information security at a major mineral corporation. Perhaps. But he’s more straightforwardly characterized as a guy who sees himself as a lone-gun, as possessing superior knowledge and intelligence and that these factors grant him the license to do whatever he wants. He tells Dade, our protagonist, that hackers are effectively a different breed of human, that they are “samurai” or “keyboard cowboys” and that the rest of the world are “cattle.” Both the image of the samurai and the cowboy are popularly depicted as loners, traveling the land free from any moorings, obligated only to themselves and their code (which takes on extra meanings from a computer-centered point of view). The Plague seeks to enrich himself at the expense of others, because why not? He sees himself as smarter and anyone not smart enough to do the same as him is a sucker. He is the American idealized individual, remade for the digital age.

In the other corner we have Dade Murphy. Known by two handles throughout the film: Crash Override and Zero Cool, Dade and his friends represent a different sort of computer hacker. Theirs is part of a subculture. At one point in the film, a federal agent reads aloud from “The Conscience of a Hacker” by Lloyd Blankenship, also known as the “Hacker Manifesto:”

This is our world now. The world of the electron and the switch; the beauty of the baud. We exist without nationality, skin color, or religious bias. You wage wars, murder, cheat, lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.

This is the exact quote from the film (sourced from IMDB), and is a selection from the actual document itself, likely edited to better summarize the ethos of our protagonists. Dade and his friends see themselves as, primarily, curious explorers (to use a phrase from near the beginning of “The Conscience of a Hacker”) who no longer define themselves by the markers that have conventionally been placed on them. We see this in action in the film whenever Dade is brought into the wider hacker subculture, particularly with the characters of Razor and Blade, two decidedly Queer-coded characters of East Asian ethnicity, who are also seen inhabiting a club full of diverse and varied people. These hackers are presented as the kind of “individual” that was commonplace among subcultures of the mid-90s, but their individuality is not a form of individualism. Rather, they represent a collectivist mentality and tend to see their intelligence and skills as tools for building a better society, using the infrastructure of the old in order to do so. Indeed, seldom is Dade ever pictured alone in the film. He is almost always sharing the screen with his friends, underscoring the collectivist characterization.

The theme of the film is pretty explicitly stated in the beginning when Dade hacks into a TV station in order to take down a Rush Limbaugh type character’s show and replace it with The Outer Limits. This era of the 1990s was an inspired time, where many of us believed that the internet opened up a new avenue for tolerance. It was also a tool for disruption, of bypassing the strictures of unfettered capitalism. Quoting also from “The Conscience of a Hacker,” Razor and Blade (hosts of a kind of “pirate TV” show, who are teaching their audience a form of “blue boxing” using a micro-cassette recorder—a technique that was already out of date by the time the movie premiered) say “this is a service that would be dirt cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons.” Adding, “remember, hacking is more than just a crime. It’s a survival trait.”

Hackers predicted the kind of world in which we are currently living. One where some hackers became “Tech Bros,” oligarchs seeking to hoard wealth no matter the human and environmental cost (recall that The Plague is fine with causing a worldwide environmental disaster, while also pinning the crime on a bunch of high school students, so long as he gets his money and stays out of jail). The individualist who believes that they are inherently superior and that that superiority obligates them to a life of wealth and leisure.

But the other kind of hacker still remains. Those who still believe that these tools are useful for liberating people, that a better world is still possible. In this sense, Cereal Killer gets to deliver what I think is the most iconic line in the movie:

Listen, we got a higher purpose here, alright? A wakeup call for the Nintendo Generation. We demand free access to data, well, it comes with some responsibility. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things. (Though it still bugs me that he says “Corinthians one” instead of “First Corinthians” right after this…)

Having access to these tools and this data comes with responsibility. They are not a license for doing whatever we want. They obligate us to look out for each other and help each other. In the film, this line delivery is the catalyst to get Dade and Burn (Angelina Jolie’s character) to end their playful rivalry, which in turn inspires an entire global community of hackers to work together to prevent the wealth hoarding Plague’s criminal actions from causing a global catastrophe.

This collectivist action is done under the call “Hack the Planet,” which is also the tagline for the movie.

This call goes deeper than the usage of network infrastructure to circumvent capitalistic exploitation. Hacking the planet involves a shift in thinking that moves beyond conventional lines of demarcation and into something focused on a common good. It refuses to see the world as a collection of individualists, but as a kind of organic whole. The “profiteering gluttons” want to keep the world divided and stupid in order to achieve their desired ends. But there are those who resist such things and refuse to accept this status quo.

One of the ironies of the internet is that it is a thing built on the protocols for military communication but is also the realm of knee-sock-wearing Queer folk. A tool for war has become a tool for peaceful liberation, a means for people to investigate (indeed even “hack”) their own self-understanding. The result does not have to be some kind of atomized individualism, but a kind of individuality that sees itself as a smaller part of a whole.

The Plague-like Tech Bros have done much to force their vision for the world on us. But another vision still exists. It might not broadcast on pirated TV signals, or rollerblade in the glitching lights of abandoned subway tunnels. It might not play Wipeout in a nightclub with people selling computer parts out front. But it still looks for workarounds. It still likes to play jokes on the Feds. It still sees a common humanity running through the labels and stigmas and geopolitical boundaries.

We can still use these tools to better the world. Because it is our world now. We might be seen as criminals. But so were most people who tried to make things better for us.

Hack the planet.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Hackers #Computers #Philosophy #Theology #Movies #Film

I started The Catechetic Converter a year ago. And I feel an obligation to write something in honor of that milestone, celebrating the fact that I’ve had my own website for a full year.

The post that has the most views is my first one, which is about Linux. And Linux and this site have an intertwined relationship in that my switch to Linux helped inspire me to get away from “Big Tech” in other ways. In fact, it was (I think) a post on Westenberg that inspired me to start the blog. The idea of having my own little corner of the web, not mediated by some corporation—and not built to make money—was appealing. Just a place to stick my random thoughts and ideas, putting them “out there” in the ether to see where they land, what they inspire… I loved that.

And Linux and this post are kind of intertwined because I have spent the past week staying up far too late most nights (in violation of one of my Lenten disciplines to go to bed by 10:30) trying to get a custom firmware to run on an MP3 player.

See, in continuance of the spirit of moving away from Big Tech, I have started disentangling myself from having everything on a phone. I asked for a Sony CyberShot F707 digital camera for Christmas (a model I had when it was brand new and stupidly donated to Goodwill or whatever several years back). And then I bought an Innioasis Y1, which hearkens back to iPods of yore (with a click-wheel and everything). This is a device that folks like to tinker with as well and I learned that people had managed to get a bespoke firmware known as RockBox—initially developed for old iPods—to run on the device, improving its functionality in numerous ways. So I planned to do this.

After what seemed like months, the device finally arrived. The standard, out-of-the-box firmware was fine, if a little rough. But the filing system for finding my music was wanting and so I decided to give RockBox a try because it offers more refinements in this area (plus a TON of fun custom themes for the device). Doing this requires downloading and running a program known as the Innioasis Updater, which was developed primarily for Windows and Mac but also includes a Linux version that is overtly said to be “unofficial” with warnings that I would be “on my own” with this. I got the sense that this would be a challenge.

I’ll spare you too many details, but I had to download another tool called MTKClient, which is written in Python, and had to run a ton of terminal commands to get running. It didn’t help that installation guides were written using LLMs and I needed to switch back and forth between two of them to get all the necessary steps right (the “official” one on GitHub failed to note the need to change directories in a couple of key places). I wound up needing certain drivers, having to write custom scripts. At one point I managed to accidentally remove all of my terminal commands thanks to forgetting to add the word “eval” to a directory. Then I also managed to lock myself into my machine (in this case a 2011-era Mac running Linux Mint) constantly trying to download Android Platform Tools from a broken mirror of a repository—which taught me a whole a range of new commands to fully purge a faulty download. After successfully installing both programs, I found that the updater would not properly read my device.

I attempted to install the program using my wife’s Windows 11 laptop and was reminded why I’ve spent over twenty years hating Microsoft.

But GitHub forums came to the rescue (where I also learned that the updater was vibe-coded using LLMs which probably explains a lot) and I got RockBox to run on the device. It now has a theme that looks like it belongs on the first MacIntosh (because even though we might have broken up, I still carry parts of her that are now parts of me). I’m listening to Maggie Rogers on the device as I write this—right after I celebrated this accomplishment with the Geto Boys’ “Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta.”

***

This morning at my parish’s Bible Study, one of my parishioners noted that I tend to have a lot of information and ephemera in my head related to any number of things related to Christianity. “I tend to think of things more simply,” he said.

I told him that I also value simplicity, but I come to that simplicity through learning and accumulating knowledge about what I’m doing and believing. For me it’s like a bell curve by way of zen. What I mean is that the zen monk may take a guy out of the mud, put him on the stool for years and teach him koans and sutras, get him to the verge of enlightenment only to then throw him back in the mud because the guy needs to learn that enlightenment can be found in the mud. In other words, I like taking things apart just to get back to where I started because I now understand that start so much better.

Tinkering and futzing with my computer speaks to this because it helps me to consider the complexity behind simple things. Like right now I’m putting letters together into words on a document. But there is an astounding amount of calculations taking place to make this happen. The words you read on your screen are the result of carefully managed electrical currents running on circuit boards and through cables connected to liquid crystal fields that display what you’re seeing. And there are also an incomprehensible number of electrical charges going on among the synapses in your brain to not only cause you to see these words, but to interpret them as things that cause you to feel things and think other things.

In the Bible Study we looked at Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus in the third chapter of John’s gospel. In that passage Jesus says that everyone born of the Spirit is like the wind (in the Greek language of John’s gospel there is a triple meaning of Spirit/wind/breath that Jesus is playing with here). The wind connects. The wind moves. This speaks to the complex connections between things, connections made by God. Connections where God can be found. And like the wind, once God shows up you know it.

***

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. I guess I’m just on the other side of bell-curve, back where I started. Putting out thoughts and words into the ether to see where they land. To see what they inspire. Which is another wind-related word, by the way. I’m writing this on a miraculous piece of technology and you’re reading it on one equally so. In between us is a dense web of complexity and connection—including both electricity and wind. We can take a look at that complexity, investigate it, see how it runs. But in the end we come back to where we began:

A writer and a reader, brought together by some wind. A wind holy and mysterious.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Linux #Christianity #Thought #Random #Jesus #Technology

Today I had an off day of surfing.

The wind was stronger than expected. It was kind of crowded for my spot. Waves were wrapping from the West and peaking, breaking almost perpendicular to shore.

When I first arrived I said a little prayer “Lord, if you want me to surf, give me a parking spot.” I drove around and, what do you know, a really nice spot near the showers opens up. As soon as I get out of the car I feel the breeze briskly picking up speed, starting to blow side-shore. I wasn’t feeling it. But the late-morning was beautiful, a classic looking south shore of O’ahu kind of day. So I grabbed my camera and took some photos of the sun glistening off the water, Diamond Head in the back ground, people paddling and swimming in the foreground—a photo that could have existed over a hundred years ago. Took close-up photos of the rocks, testing out a 25 year old digital camera I got for Christmas, to replace an exact model I had short-sightedly given away years back.

I return to my car and stare at the water. An uncle next to me is gearing up to paddle out. Another uncle, his friend, comes over and they start talking story. I decide to call it and make my way around toward the driver’s side.

“Eh! You going out?!” the other uncle says.

“Nah. Too windy.”

“Can I have your stall, den?”

“Sure.”

“I come back. Get one brown SUV. Eh watch my water bottle while I go gettum.”

As he leaves his water bottle on the curb and walks away I look at his friend and I joke: “he’s very trusting. Gotta watch out for these haoles you know!” I say with a smile. “We known for taking things.”

“Eh,” the first uncle says with a dismissive tone. “All kinds of people can do all kinds of things.”

We get to talking. Richard is his name. I’ve seen him in the water before, but he usually paddles out shortly as I’m heading in. Today I’m at the spot at a later time. He urges me to go out.

“Too crowded. Plus I told your friend I’d give up my spot for him.”

He dismisses this and tells me it’s good and I need to go out. Eventually the brown SUV comes rolling around. I give shakas and say goodbye as I drive away. About five cars down I see another car pulling out. As I drive past I can’t shake the feeling that this is all God’s way of telling me that I need to paddle out. So I loop around and pull into the other spot. This one is actually better because it has more shade. I pull down my 11-foot glider (pretty much my exclusive board for the past three years), sunscreen, wetsuit vest zipped up. And I walk over to the cut between rocks where I can paddle out. I see Richard and I tell him that he convinced me to change my mind. He gives a loud approval.

I make the paddle in good time. The crowd thinned a bit in the interim. Waves have power. I see a few familiar faces, folks I did not expect to see in the water because they’re usually out at my normal time. I see a wave on the horizon, taking shape. I whip my board around and paddle. I feel the momentum taking me so I hop to my feet. The wave is beginning to break in front of me, so I go to fade left and surf on my back-hand. But there’s no face there. The wave is a strict right. So I fade back to front-side and try to get into it. I squat and begin scooping at the water, hoping to pick up more speed, but no dice. So I paddle back out, chuckling to myself.

After a while I see a set forming on the horizon. No one seems to be going for it, so I spin around and start paddling. I easily catch the wave and drop in, going right. I squat a bit in the face and then stand to adjust my position, dropping down the face in order to carve my way back up. But I see that it’s walling up too far ahead and is going to close out. So I fade back left to see another closing section coming behind me. So I turn to go straight and ride out the whitewater. But I get caught between two breaking sections, the foam engulfing my board and I feel the force underneath me. I get knocked off my board and plunged under the foam. I feel the chaos of the colliding waves rolling over me and I surrender to the current. Once the wave fully passes I surface. Another wave is breaking, but I have enough time to take stock of my surroundings and know that my board has made its way toward shore, pretty far from my location.

So I start swimming.

At this point I should probably note that I prefer to surf without a leash. Unless it’s particularly big and/or crowded, I’ll forego having a urethane chord dancing about my feet. Leashes can give us a sense of false security. They can and will fail and so we need to be prepared to swim when that eventually happens. Plus, leash-free surfing forces one to be more intentional in their surfing, as well as cognizant of one’s board.

It’s been awhile since I’ve had a long swim for a board. Since I’m wearing a wet-suit vest, I have some buoyancy and I have better results from flipping on my back and kicking my way toward my board. I hold my breath and descend under white water, wait for the roll of the wave to wash over me, return to the surface, and then kick my way again.

There’s always a threat of panic in the back of my mind when I have to swim for a board. I’m pretty far from the beach where I surf and there’s a lot of water. Also infrequent tiger shark sightings. But I keep myself calm. Eventually I see that an off-duty lifeguard who surfs my spot has retrieved my board. I thank him and grab it. I bob on the inside, considering the time and effort it would take to get my leash. Nah. I’ll paddle back out.

As I’m nearing the outside, I see the lifeguard wipe out. His big yellow board is bouncing among the whitewater, making its way to shore. He, too, is not wearing a leash. So I turn my board around and grab some whitewater and make my way to where his board is bobbing on the shallow reef. I grab it and start paddling in his direction. He gets it. I tell him we’re even. We both laugh and paddle back out.

By the time I make it back outside, I’m getting tired. I tell one of the uncles I know that I got my swim in for the day and he laughs. The wind has significantly picked up and is blowing almost onshore. After a time I see another wave making its way toward me. It’s mine. I paddle and begin to make the drop a bit later than I was expecting. So I grab the rails and decide to ride it on my belly. The speed is unreal. I’m constantly on the verge of being rolled over, but I keep my composure and let myself fly toward the beach. I decide that I’m not about to paddle back out. This will be the ride, for what it’s worth.

The wave peters out in the shallows of the reef. The tide is nearly dead low, which means that I’ll have to be careful not to let my fin hit anything.

I’m a good surfer. I’ve been at it for 26 years. I get long nose rides on the well-formed South Shore faces. I drop in and run my hands along the face of the waves. I’ve even garnered compliments for my ability to hit the lip with an 11-foot board, on occasion. I’ve shaped boards, ridden a variety of designs. I know the mythology and the legends. I know surfing inside and out.

And I still have off days.

Blessed be the off days.

That saying came into my mind as I carefully paddled over the shallow reef. A large honu (sea turtle) popped its head up next to me. “Hey, cuz!” I said. It swam directly under my board.

This past Sunday we heard Jesus give the Beatitudes. There’s a tendency to read the Beatitudes as Jesus giving us a list of rewards: “be a peacemaker, get a blessing; put up with grief and persecution; get a blessing.” But Jesus is actually saying that peace-making, grieving, being persecuted, being poor in spirit, etc. are themselves blessings. In the Greek language that Matthew’s gospel was maybe first written in, the Beatitudes are in what’s called the “indicative mood.” Meaning that the blessings are indicated by the other stuff. The blessings aren’t rewards for doing certain things.

This idea translates broadly. An off-day of surfing is a blessing, if I choose to see it. Blessed be the off days, because they help you appreciate the better days. Or, Blessed be the off days, because they make you a better swimmer.

I didn’t get to have a morning of beautiful glides on my huge board. I didn’t get to run to the nose and hang ten on a perfectly groomed wave face. I didn’t even get to drop in while squatted down, feeling the cool water with my fingers as I experience the thrill of dropping into the face of a wave and setting myself up for an elegant bottom turn to set my rail and just… go.

Nope. I got wiped out. I swam a lot. I got skunked on wind-blown waves that were both somehow mushy and strong.

But I got in the water. I learned that I’m finally mature enough to appreciate even the days where my surfing kinda sucks.

Blessed be the off days, indeed.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Surfing #Reflection #Ocean #Theology #Jesus #Church #Hawaii #Oahu

In my recent series on the commemorations for the week between Christmas Day and the Feast of the Holy Name, I managed to generate some small degree of controversy and discussion when I mentioned that the Massacre of the Innocents as recorded in Matthew’s gospel likely did not actually happen. As I said in that piece, there is no extra-biblical historical evidence that the event occurred. Even one of the most important historians we rely on, Josephus, did not include any mention of Herod killing scores of infants—and Josephus does not hold back on his criticisms of the Herodians.

Now, I am willing to admit one caveat, and that is there’s a theory that maybe the massacre happened, but it wasn’t a large-scale event involving thousands of children. Given the limitations of the information supplied by Magi, how many kids could have been born in the narrow window of a) when the star appeared and, b) in Bethlehem? If this was the case, then Herod ordering the murder of a small number of kids would hardly register among all the horrible things he was known for and might not garner a mention from historians and scribes of the time.

However, I still hold to the contention that Matthew is not interested in recording precise, “accurate” (as we understand the term) history so much so as writing a story that he feels is true in regards to Jesus. Perhaps the causes that lead to the Holy Family taking flight to Egypt were more of a slow-burn situation, where young kids were likely to die and so, inspired by God, Joseph takes Jesus and Mary (in an event that echoes also another Joseph—one who managed to shelter the patriarchs in Egypt during a time of famine). Matthew wants to express the dire situation to the Church and so telling a story about Herod murdering kids communicates that truth. It’s a story that feels true to who Herod is and is a kind of short-hand way of helping Christians born years, even decades, after the event understand what a monster the man was.

But this all serves as a way to address an important elephant when it comes to reading the Bible: it isn’t always historically accurate. This provides grounds for a kind of crisis of faith when we treat the whole “divine inspiration” thing in terms of what we call today “biblical inerrancy.” In other words, if the Bible is a book that God basically dictated to various writers and is, therefore, God’s actual words on paper, then what are we to make of things when the Bible and facts don’t line up? Is God lying to us? Does God get His facts mixed up? Or is there some demonic plot being enacted by historians and scholars to try and discredit the Bible? (This latter thing was basically the view of my church growing up; if the Bible and facts didn’t agree, then it was facts that needed to change—we can see such thinking happening in certain political circles today, but I digress).

In order to discuss this, we’ll need to break a few things down—namely, what we mean by “history” and what is meant by “divine inspiration.”

WHAT IS HISTORY?

History seems like a straightforward thing. It is the discipline of chronicling past events so that we can keep posterity and revisit what has come before, right? Yes. But our modern conception of history is something a bit different from what our ancestors thought of when they conceived of history. See, our current understanding of history is shaped by the scientific method, which came about in the 1700s. Prior to this, the phenomena of our world were seen in terms of analogy. Take, for instance, reproduction. We continue to use vestigial language from our agrarian past to speak of how organisms reproduce, language like “seed” and “fertility.” The word sperm comes from the Greek sperma which means “seed.” So, for much of human history, we saw all forms of reproduction as analogous to agriculture: a seed is planted in a fertile space where new life emerges. It wasn’t until the invention of the microscope and the advent of the scientific method that we began to challenge this analogy and see if there’s something else going on. What emerged during this time was the concept of facts.

Prior to the mid-16th century, the Latin term factum referred simply to “a thing done or performed.” This usage is still common in the legal realm. Those of us who grew up with Dragnet recall Joe Friday regularly saying to witnesses, “just the facts.” In other words, recall the events without commentary or elucidation. Deborah went to the store at 5:15 in the evening. But, with the emergence of modern science, facts began to take on greater precedence. Facts were considered pure and superior, a distillation of the essence of a thing. Facts represent something that is observable and repeatable. Deborah can go to the store at 5:15 and so can I. What I can’t do is inhabit Deborah’s frame of mind. I can’t know what she was thinking as she walked to the store, how happy or unhappy she might have been. The fleeting thoughts and emotions she felt during that stroll. These are all unique to her, making them not reproducible and, therefore, useless in terms of data. They are extraneous, important to Deborah perhaps, but not important for finding out if Deborah saw James fleeing the scene of Jesse’s murder, which happened across from the store at around 5:25.

Thomas Jefferson famously applied such thinking to the Gospels. Since miracles and other supernatural events are not reproducible, repeating and measurable phenomena, Jefferson stripped the gospels of any reference to them. Jefferson believed this made for a more “true” Gospel because it was a gospel of facts. The bias of the scientific method is that facts are truth. If something is not factual then it isn’t true. And something is only factual if it is an observable, repeatable event free from extraneous conditions. Deborah can go to the store at 5:15 regardless of whether she’s happy or sad or praying or thinking about the baseball game. Those things are ancillary to facts. What is personal to her is not, objectively, true according to modern science.

So when we record history, we now aim to be as factual as possible. I used to be a journalist and journalism is a key resource for historians. The discipline of journalism is to write things as dispassionately as possible, removing your own feelings and commentary and presenting things as “factually” as one can, leaving the reader to decide how to think and feel about those things.

Now, I’m not here to argue against facts. Facts are important. I’m simply attempting to demonstrate that, one, the prioritizing of facts is a relatively recent event in human history and, two, perhaps to suggest that facts leave a lot of things out of a story.

When I was a journalist I was also a creative writer, working on a novel, and getting short fiction and poems published in TINY journals and publications (I did manage to get once piece of fairly unhinged “fan mail” for a five-line poem that was picked up by a publication that was simply photo copied sheets of paper to be stuck onto bulletin boards and whatnot). Creative writing gives texture to facts. That’s where we dwell on Deborah’s frustration that the short-stop dropped the ball in the bottom of the ninth, causing the other team to get two runners to home plate, costing her team the game—and that this frustration mirrors the frustration she feels that her husband is always working too late to go to the store and grab a gallon milk for the house, leaving her to have to do it and making her feel like the center-fielder who had to make up for the short-stop’s mistake. Indeed, the creative writer will say that the real story is found in spots like these and not the facts. Facts make for poor story-telling.

The ancients knew this. When they wrote histories, they weren’t simply recording dispassionate facts. They were telling stories, stories full of texture and meaning. Their goal was to get readers to feel the story being told. In order to do this, elements might be told out of order, or hyperbole was employed, or even, at times, what we call “fiction” was used. The facts of the story might not be straight, but the Truth absolutely was.

Here’s an example from the gospels: Jesus’ cleansing of the temple. In the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) it serves as a kind of crescendo to Jesus’ story. The Synoptics all depict Jesus moving from Galilee and making His way to Jerusalem to where He enters in triumph, chases out the money-changers from the temple, which makes Him a more serious target of the religious authorities. But in John, Jesus cleanses the temple right at the beginning of His ministry, right after coming out of the desert and His 40-day-long bout with Satan. Further, John depicts Jesus going to and from Jerusalem on a regular basis. If all four gospels are true, how do we reconcile their conflicting facts? Do we say, as some have, that Jesus must have cleansed the temple twice? If that’s the case, why don’t all four gospels testify to that?

Perhaps we’re thinking of this incorrectly. We need to get back to that ancient way of thinking and consider that Truth is something that cannot be reduced down to simple facts. As Ian Markham, the dean and president of Virginia Theological Seminary, is know to say, we Christians do not read a book, we read a life; the book is important because the book testifies to the life. Given this, no true story of a life can be told only in fact. Truth moves beyond fact. And so, as a result, it doesn’t really matter when Jesus cleansed the temple. What matters is that Jesus is someone who cleanses the temple, whether as the culmination of His earthly ministry or resulting from being in the power of the Spirit after overcoming the devil in the wilderness. The facts of the story are in service to the Truth.

WHAT IS DIVINE INSPIRATION?

There are, of course, many many misunderstood passages in the Bible. Many of them are found in the writings of Saint Paul. This shouldn’t surprise us because even the Bible itself tells us that Paul is hard to understand, with Saint Peter writing:

Consider the patience of our Lord to be salvation, just as our dear friend and brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given to him, speaking of these things in all his letters. Some of his remarks are hard to understand, and people who are ignorant and whose faith is weak twist them to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures. (2 Peter 3:15-16 CEB)

This is an important passage for a couple of reasons. First, it shows that the Church received Paul’s writings as scripture fairly early on. Second, it gives us a fun little insight into the lives of the early saints: even one of Paul’s friends—the one considered to be the first pope—has a hard time understanding what the heck he’s saying.

But one of the most broadly (and, I’d argue, dangerously) misunderstood things Paul wrote comes from a letter he wrote to his young protege named Timothy:

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: (2 Timothy 3:16 KJV)

And let’s also use the NIV version, since that’s arguably the one most people would know these days:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, (2 Timothy 3:16 NIV)

So, here Saint Paul teaches that “all scripture” is “inspired,” which is translated as “God-breathed” in newer English versions. This leads us to the conclusion that “scripture” is something breathed from God, thus God’s very words, transcribed by holy writers. Or is it?

Before we begin to look at what it means that something is “God-breathed,” we need to take a look at the word “scripture.” We use the word exclusively for religious writings, but in its original sense “scripture” simply means “a thing written.” So, “writings.”

To put the passage literally, it would read “All writings are God-breathed.” Is this what Saint Paul is saying? That all writing is breathed out by God? Not only the Bible, but the Qur’an, the Upanishads, the Book of Mormon? Not only “religious” books but also The Catcher in the Rye, the Godzilla collectibles guide on my shelf, and the instruction manual to my TV? I don’t think this is what Saint Paul is teaching Saint Timothy.

The word “scripture” (graphe in Greek) is used exclusively in the Bible to refer to the writings of the Bible. We saw this a bit earlier with Saint Peter using the term to refer to Saint Paul’s letters. Elsewhere, it is used in reference to the books of the Old Testament. So the term seems to be applied to certain writings in this context.

Now, a lot of Christians will say that in this case “the scriptures” is simply short-hand for “the Bible.” But things are not that simple. For one, there was no such thing as “the Bible” when Paul was writing Timothy this letter. You might say “well, okay, sure; the New Testament wasn’t all written yet, but there was the Old Testament.”

It may surprise you to learn that what we think of as the Old Testament did not exist until around the 600s at the earliest. That’s 600 AD (or CE nowadays). As in, 600 years after the time of Jesus.

Now before you start writing me emails or replies on Mastodon, let me finish. I’m not saying that the writings themselves didn’t exist until then. I’m saying that the writings that make up the Old Testament as we know it were not put together into a definitive collection of 39 books (24 in rabbinic Judaism because a few of the books are consolidated and treated as a single book, notably the minor prophets) until that time. Yes there were translations of these books into Greek (called the Septuagint) and for many Christians those translations were treated as “the Bible” of their time, but given that some of the books are never referenced in the New Testament and they did not exist in a single volume, there is some question over what books were considered “official” back then. The group of rabbis known as the Masoretes were the ones who assembled the Old Testament as we know it in the 600-900s. Their list of books is what is used by Protestant Christians for the Old Testament.

This is all to say that the term “scripture” was something coming into form at the time of Saint Paul’s writing. And his use of the phrase “God-breathed” is likely a mechanism to help Saint Timothy know what writings are truly Christian and which ones to avoid. This is especially crucial given the preponderance of gnostic and anti-Gentile writings making the rounds at the time.

Perhaps seeing the passage in some wider context will help us. I am fan of the Common English Bible, so I tend to use that:

But you must continue with the things you have learned and found convincing. You know who taught you. Since childhood you have known the holy scriptures that help you to be wise in a way that leads to salvation through faith that is in Christ Jesus. Every scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for showing mistakes, for correcting, and for training character, so that the person who belongs to God can be equipped to do everything that is good. (2 Timothy 3:14-18 CEB)

It might be bad scholarship on my part, but I tend to read the passage like this: “Every scripture that is inspired by God is useful for teaching,” etc. In other words, Saint Paul is reminding Saint Timothy that he is able to discern which writings are “God-breathed” and which ones aren’t. This isn’t so much a working definition on the doctrine of scripture as much as it is a piece of practical wisdom: if it doesn’t sound like scripture, then it isn’t. It’s one of the reasons that we can say that something like the Gospel of Thomas doesn’t bear the aroma of God’s breath—it ends with Jesus telling Saint Peter that Saint Mary of Magdala will need to be reincarnated as a man in order to enter heaven. And those “God-breathed” writings serve the purpose of instruction and formation to make for good Christians.

So the Bible itself does not define itself as being the result of God dictating His words into the ears of particular people. Rather, God breathes through the words that have been written, giving those of us who know Him through prayer and devotion the means to recognize Him in particular writings. Those writings are valuable because they evoke the very breath of God—like us!—and therefore have something to say about the sort of people God wants us to be.

TRUTH IN FICTION

This brings us back to the question of fiction and the Bible. Can the Bible contain fictional material and yet remain true? Yes.

Let’s ask this question a slightly different way: can God’s breath be detected through fiction? If we say no then we risk limiting God… Given that God is sovereign and gets what He wants because He is God, it is very much the case that God can use fiction as means for declaring His truth. Indeed, the book of Job is pretty much accepted as being an intentional work of fiction, but is held dearly as a source of beauty and truth—especially for those broken-hearted and desperate for God. Aside from that, we have entire books of poetry in the Bible and poetry is a medium that is not tied to mere fact, given to expansive and hyperbolic language in order to express Truth, God’s Truth.

So, the Bible isn’t always factual. That’s okay. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true. God can use fiction to express His Truth to us. Fact or fiction doesn’t matter as much as whether or not we can detect the presence of God’s breath in the story, whether or not the story is useful for teaching us and forming us into the sort of humans He has redeemed us to become.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

It is New Year’s Eve as I write this. Tomorrow not only marks the start of the Year of our Lord, 2026, it also marks the end of the first week of Christmas. The feast for that is one that we call the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, but this is a more recent name. For much of Christian history, this has been known as the Feast of the Circumcision.

The readings for the day reflect this: “After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb” (Luke 2:21 NRSV). Matthew keeps thing brief by simply noting that Joseph names Jesus (indeed, the actual birth of Jesus more or less happens “off camera” in Matthew’s gospel). In Jewish custom, a male child is circumcised on the eighth day after birth, the number eight being significant as a marker of a new beginning. It was also the custom to declare the child’s name for the first time.

It is curious to me that we in the Episcopal Church opt to ignore the circumcision aspects of the feast day, especially given the fact that we’ve begun addressing areas prone to anti-Semitic interpretation in our liturgical calendar (with a lot of focus on how various readings from John’s gospel have been misconstrued for anti-Semitic purposes over the centuries). That Jesus was incarnate as a Jew is central to understanding Him. His being circumcised is what denotes Him as a Jew.

The scholar Susannah Heschel, the daughter of the great Abraham Heschel, wrote an excellent-though-disturbing book entitled Aryan Jesus that traces the development of Nazi theology and the anti-Semitic threads that ran through German theology going back at least as far as Martin Luther (who was famously anti-Semitic). She places a degree of importance on the liberal theological developments of the late 1800s and early 1900s and how much work was done to distance Jesus from His Jewish identity. Many of the scholars and theologians from this time managed to survive WWII and wound up working in American universities and seminaries. Since the US did not treat such academics as Nazis or Nazi sympathizers, they were able to operate fairly unnoticed, continuing to articulate a Jesus quite divorced from His Jewish heritage.

We see two lasting legacies of this work. The first is the continued treatment of gnosticism as a kind of suppressed “true” version of Christianity that the Church felt threatened by. One of the hallmarks of Christian gnostic ideas is that the God of Judaism is an evil being called the “Demiurge” who wants to enslave humanity in our material existence (with Jesus representing a true God of light that wants to free us from the corruptions of our flesh and materiality). Such gnostic ideas find a degree of resonance with schools of Buddhism, and this is the other legacy of the volkish, Nazi-adjacent theologies of early-20th Century German theology: the attempts to connect Jesus with Buddha. Putting Jesus closer to Buddhism takes Him further away from His Jewishness. Ironically, some of the most avowedly “progressive” people I know unwittingly subscribe to a theological line that was created by vile anti-Semites, but do so out of some desire to be inclusive.

The much-celebrated theologian Stanley Hauerwas says that Christians cannot be properly Christian without understanding themselves as Jewish first. In that same vein he would argue that Jesus cannot be properly understood without knowing Him as a Jew. Which means that we should be talking about the Feast of the Circumcision, even if the topic is uncomfortable. It is the only right and proper thing to do if we are serious about resisting anti-Semitism in our religion.

I spent the majority of my ordained ministry in Southeast Florida, the last six of which in Boca Raton before being called to Saint Mary’s. If you don’t know, Boca Raton has a very large Jewish population. I was also the head chaplain of an Episcopal School, which tends to draw students from the Jewish community (some estimates said that our student population was somewhere around 40% Jewish). Ministering in this context was invaluable for me in my own theological development. There are things about Jesus and the New Testament that I would never have picked up on had I not spent a ton of time around Jews. For instance, the notorious story of Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman (found in Mark and Luke) seems to most like a story of Jesus being a jerk to a woman in need, his reference to “throwing to dogs” what is meant for “the children” sounding like a racial slur. But this story is actually Jesus at His most rabbinical, teaching a lesson to His disciples in a manner quite consistent with the accounts of the rabbis in the Talmud and Mishna. I never would have caught this had I not been blessed with the opportunity to teach and lead worship with a large group of Jewish students.

In like manner, I would not have learned about the importance of names. Names in the Bible are not arbitrarily repeated because names in Judaism are not arbitrarily repeated. In some Jewish traditions, a child is only named after a dead relative—or after a hero of the faith, with the expectation that they will live according to the name given them.

Notice Joseph. We have two Josephs in our Bible: the child of Jacob/Israel, of technicolor-dream-coat fame and Mary’s husband, who helped raise Jesus. Both have parallel stories in that both are forced into Egypt for the express purpose of preserving God’s people. There’s also the fact that both Josephs are fathers to respective Jesuses.

New Testament Joseph is, of course, the “earthly” father of Jesus. Old Testament Joseph, Joseph ben Israel, went to Egypt. While there he married Asenath and had two children: Manasseh and Ephraim. For whatever reason, Joseph ben Israel does not get a tribe named after him. Instead, his two sons do. From Ephraim (after several generations) begets Nun, who begets Moses’ eventual second-in-command, Joshua. In Hebrew the name “Joshua” is rendered as Yeshua which is also translated in Greek as “Jesus.” This is cool for a couple of reasons.

First, the name means “God’s salvation/deliverer.” Joshua ben Nun is said to have delivered God’s people to their promised land and also liberated (saved) it from idolaters. Joshua/Jesus is, of course, the Savior or humanity and creation. Second, Judaism holds to an idea of two Messiahs, one from David’s lineage (the Mashiach ben David) and another from Joseph’s (the Mashiach ben Yosef), a Messiah that is destined to die in battle. The Gospels are more overt about Jesus’ connections to David, but these connections to Joseph ben Israel cannot be ignored. That God would want New Testament Joseph to name Mary’s son after the famed liberator Joshua helps to speak of the ways in which Jesus fulfills Jewish messianic prophecies—He’s both messiahs, one that dies and one that lives!

Again, these are the sorts of things we miss out on when ignore Jesus’ Jewishness. Indeed, an entire level of meaning of Jesus’ name is lost when we focus on the name at the expense of the circumcision. The two go together, as the scriptures attest.

We are told that Jesus’ name is the “name above all names,” a name at which “every knee shall bend.” That name is, inescapably, a Jewish name rife with Jewish meaning. This is a fact we ignore to our detriment.

In closing out this series on the week of post-Christmas commemorations, we return to the Child that started it all. And we consider once again the words of one the great hymns of this season:

What child is this, who, laid to rest, On Mary’s lap is sleeping, Whom angels greet with anthems sweet While shepherds watch are keeping? This, this is Christ the King, Whom shepherds guard and angels sing; Haste, haste to bring Him laud, The babe, the son of Mary!

This is Jesus, God’s salvation. This is Jesus, the King of the Jews. This is Jesus, the seed promised to Abraham, from which the entire world is blessed.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

For the past several years, I’ve maintained the discipline of listening to mostly Christian music during Advent, most of it Christmas music. Last year was the year I fell in love with “O, Holy Night,” particularly the version sung by Tracy Chapman. I’m also fond of the reggae version]() from Christafari (their Reggae Christmas compilation is on regular repeat during this time of year). It is this latter version that I first caught the words of the third verse:

Truly He taught us to love one another; His law is love and His gospel is peace; Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother, And in His name all oppression shall cease. Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we, Let all within us praise His holy name; Christ is the Lord, Oh, praise His name forever! His powr and glory evermore proclaim! His powr and glory evermore proclaim!

For whatever reason, I did not know that this was an abolitionist hymn. This is probably due to the fact that the first verse is the most commonly sung (even Tracy Chapman doesn’t sing either of the other verses in her otherwise excellent rendition). Regardless, something about this line moves me to tears when I first hear it during the Advent season. It speaks powerfully to what Saint Mary sings in the Magnificat, what the birth of Jesus is intended by God to do: to usurp the power dynamics of our world and to proclaim freedom to the captive.

This is reflected in the saint commemorated in the Episcopal Church’s calendar today: Frances Joseph-Gaudet. Initially I was going to write about Saint Anysia of Thessaloniki. This was partly due to some confusion on my part over our calendar (Frances is listed as being commemorated on the 31st in our current edition of Lesser Feasts and Fasts, but was commemorated on the 30th in the previous editions). But Anysia is not recognized in our calendar (she’s remembered in the Orthodox Churches). Plus, she’s another martyr and—intending no disrespect to any of the Holy Martyrs—I imagine that some of us are a bit overwhelmed by reading about murdered saints day-after-day. What of someone who incarnated the gospel in a way that didn’t end with hurled rocks, or decades of exile, or political executions, or drawn swords in a cathedral? That brings us to Frances.

From what I can gather, Frances is held in high regard in the diocese of Louisiana, where she lived and ministered. She was not an ordained person, but nonetheless lived a life dedicated to the gospel of Jesus Christ, particularly that part about breaking chains and having love as His law. She was dedicated to the work of prison reform, especially in regards to young Black men. Which she did in 1930s Louisiana. As a woman. Born of mixed race as Black and Native American.

No wonder she’s a saint.

There is one connection with Saint Anysia that is worth commenting on: both were committed to the work of the gospel during troublesome times as single women. Saint Anysia was a consecrated virgin active during the persecutions of Diocletian. Saint Frances was a divorced woman (seeking the divorce because her husband was an alcoholic—this also influenced her commitment to the Temperance movement), raising her three children as a seamstress, during the deep racism of pre-Civil-Rights America.

Frances began her ministerial work by holding prayer meetings for families with sons and daughters in prison. This then turned into prayer meetings with prisoners, making and proving clothes to prisoners, and the work of helping young men get back to some kind of normal life after being released from prison. She would take charge of young men after attending juvenile court (something that she also advocated for—previously, young men were tried as adults exclusively), eventually needing to acquire more land in order to house them and educate them. This evolved into the Gaudet Episcopal Home (after she donated the property to the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana).

All of this as she remained a woman of meager means. She focused her efforts on her school and became its principal, but she was never a wealthy woman.

She serves as an example we all need: someone who did great things for the gospel using what she had in front of her. She heard the plight of her friends and neighbors, saw the injustice of the penal system (which perpetuates to this day, sadly), and did what she could, building on each development as the Lord provided.

One of my little maxims when it comes to parish ministry is that the most effective ministry is the one that a parish wants to do, not the one it feels obligated to do. We’ve seen this throughout Saint Mary’s history. In our story, we’ve been a Sunday School for Chinese and Japanese children, a medical dispensary, an orphanage, a school, and a parish (which actually is a fairly recent development for us, only really beginning in the 1960s). Each time we’ve made a change, it seems to be based on us discerning what we are both willing and able to do rather than taxing ourself with what we feel obligated to do.

But this philosophy is not limited to parish communities. It also applies to individuals. The first time I ever saw this, I was still in seminary. I had interned at Saint Paul’s in Newnan, Georgia for a summer. In one of my sermons I mentioned how we could use what we already have for the benefit of God’s work, referencing the model used by Toms Shoes as an illustration. Toms, which were immensely popular in the late 00s, have a one-for-one model: you buy a pair of their shoes and another pair is set aside for person in need, footwear being a significant preventative for lots of diseases and infections throughout most of the world. After that summer, I went back to seminary for a semester and then was home for Christmas, where the rector of Saint Paul’s invited me to serve at the Christmas services. After one of the services a parishioner came up to me very excitedly and handed me a gift bag. Inside were four hand-made wine glass charms (so you can identify your glass when at a party at someone’s house). She told me that she had been trying to think of ways to help people in need. Then the Spirit moved her during my sermon and she realized that she could use her beading hobby as means to foster God’s kingdom. So she partnered with a charity and used proceeds from her wine glass charms (which she sold at a local farmer’s market) to support their work.

When we think of saints and saintly work, we tend to think of people like Saint Stephen or Saint John or maybe even Saint Thomas—people who made giant gestures of faith that ultimately cost them their lives in a direct sense. Or we think of Saint Theresa of Calcutta, who became a nun and helped the poor in India die with dignity. But Saint Frances of New Orleans reminds us that saintly gestures begin simply and within our current means. We don’t need to be a nun or a deacon or the second-most-powerful-person in the English realm in order to effect great things for God’s kingdom. We can be a single mother working as a seamstress, sharing the pain of other mothers lamenting their children in jail and the unjust systems that put them there.

When I was a school chaplain I used to say to my students at the start of the school year: you are called to change the world; only the world you change might not be your own. Simply holding the hand of and praying with a mother whose son has been imprisoned for a petty charge can change her world in profound ways, even ways we might not know until all is revealed in God’s coming Kingdom.

Saint Frances of New Orleans heard the words of Jesus at the start of His ministry, when He picked up Isaiah’s scroll and read to the poor people of Nazareth:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19 CEB)

Or, as Charles Wesley would put it:

His law is love and His gospel is peace; Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother, And in His name all oppression shall cease.

That is something we can also do, one small moment at a time.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.