The Diocesan Dialogue
Current Issue
April 2007

Bishop's Reflections

Last week when visiting the University of Utah I wore a butterfly pin on my lapel. Someone I didn't know came up to me and remarked, "Hey, I thought it was Lent. Why are you wearing and Easter symbol?"

Afterward, I thought, 'She knew a little but not a lot!'

The butterfly is indeed a symbol of the resurrection of Christ we celebrate at Easter, but not simply as an historical event—or an annual one either! For all of us it is the gift and promise of new life, the presence of the risen life of Christ within and among us, at all times.

The signs of this new life (abundant and eternal life) are always with us, so we needn't wait for Easter Day to discover them.

Rather, that is the day we hear the story that draws all such signs together. This realization has helped me to understand why it is that Christmas often doesn't come to me on Dec. 25, nor Pentecost after the 50 days, nor Easter at the moment I am trying to preach about it!

I love our liturgical calendar, which gives us markers for celebrations and seasons, but the realities they commemorate are not calendarbound.

Rather they are like little (and sometimes big) "showings" of something about to come, something that binds us together, something that may expand or even replace our old sense of self.

I wonder, then, if it mightn't be helpful for us to recall some of these "showings" that have emerged in our lives, giving us a glimmer of new possibilities and realities, a sense of calling or movement, direction or hope—in whatever season?

At the time they may not appear to be divine in origin, to be realistic, or even significant; yet in retrospect we often discover that they have become foundational to our being as Christians, and to the faith we proclaim.

For myself, such a moment was hearing my father say, "God is weeping with us tonight" after my younger brother's tragic death. I was just eight years old and hadn't a clue, but later in life when wrestling with the problem of suffering, his comment ‘answered'—even though it was not ‘an answer' to that problem.

Seeing a bundle of wheat and a bunch of grapes in a small stained glass window in my first Episcopal Church, I was truly liberated by the sudden realization that I was just one of many.

I didn't need to try to be 'special' anymore. A small child took hold of my hand in a shopping mall one day. He didn't mistake me for his mother, as it turned out, but as we set out to look for his mother I knew that for that time he was my child.

The first time I processed in a candlelit church on Christmas Eve, I began to cry. Sometimes a word or passage of scripture simply stops me from reading on. When a sudden peace comes over me I know it to be Christ's gift, freely given, and all worry leaves me.

Phrases from the Prayer Book, or hymns, signal prayer in my heart.

Such recollections are small and not small, ordinary and not so ordinary.

They do not suspend the disciplines of Lent, but sometimes get things out of the way so that we can stay the course, seeing the hand of God already at work in our lives.

The seasons of Lent and Easter are forever interwoven, for the sake of our lives, the Church, and the world. May it always be so.

Faithfully, The Rt. Rev. Carolyn Tanner Irish

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