When Love Shows Up: Weekly Reflections about God’s Presence

Rector’s Blog, Giving Up - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

One of the best things about New Year's resolutions is when you give up on them. I don't mean when you miss a day, or start to slack: I mean when you just throw in the towel and say, ok this isn't happening in 2023. 2024 will be my year.I am ready to do that today.
You might remember in a previous blog I said that I was not going to try to be a better person this year. New Year Same Me, I said. That was essentially my New Year's resolution: to be myself and not try to get better. But I keep wanting to try to be a better person anyway. I keep slacking and accidentally wanting to be less terrible. Friends, how do I win the fight against self-improvement? I think I'm throwing in the towel. I think I want to be better, whether I like it or not.
Each year, on or around Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I re-read King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. This is a letter he wrote while incarcerated for marching against racial segregation in Alabama in 1963. I read to be inspired and challenged of course - but also to be convicted. Let me explain.

Rector’s Blog, Dumpuary - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Dumpuary is a term coined by the now defunct pop-culture website Grantland. This movie season runs through January and February, basically post-holiday, pre-Oscar time. It's during this time that studios dump the movies they wonder why they made, their least promising works. It's a strange mix of smaller, cheaper movies that might just make some money during a dry moviegoing season, and larger movies that should've been a big deal but turned out poorly, and the studio has to release them anyway. Hence Dumpuary. It is just an awful time to go to the movies.In case you were wondering if we are currently in Dumpuary, the movies that are being released in theaters this week look like this: The Devil Conspiracy, in which a biotech company made up of secret satanists uses the Shroud of Turin to try to clone Jesus and offer him up to the Devil. No, I am not kidding. Also opening is a reboot of the 90's hip-hop comedy House Party, and an action movie about a plane called, well, "Plane." This, my friends is Dumpuary.
But I'm a priest, not a movie critic, so we should talk about Jesus - and not the cloned one from that Devil Conspiracy movie.

Rector’s Blog, New Year Same Me - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

This is a good time to say that Christmas cards are not for everyone, and they are not a status symbol or a sign of particular popularity. It's like some odd club one gets into. Maybe you decide you're going to send out cards just this one year. But it's like the mafia - there's no escape. Just when you think you're out, they pull you back in. Mostly we send cards specifically to the people who have sent cards to us. And for the people in our little Christmas card cult, sometimes that's the only time we all check in with each other all year. If you don't get a Christmas card from me and you want one, just tell me. That's how you get on the list.Anyway, 8 days later we returned home to a big stack of new cards. And it hit me: It was not that a large group of friends had written us off, it's that this year they just happened to be as overwhelmed and behind as we usually are!And I have to tell you this was a great comfort to me. There is such joy in finding out I'm not the only mess I know.Every time the calendar flips from December to January, I hear the refrain "New Year New Me." This is what follows Christmas. I am supposed to conclude my celebration of hope and salvation by deciding to become a different person, or failing that, a marginally better person. New Year New You. The assumption being that you are constantly in need of improvement. And, hey, maybe you are. But I keep thinking about the ways we measure ourselves and the ways we fall short of our own expectations.

Rector’s Blog Throwback Series, The More You Love - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this podcast which was originally posted on August 25, 2022
Of course, I loved music, but somehow the number, the size of the CD collection became just as important as actually listening and enjoying the music. I assumed CDs, which supplanted both vinyl records and cassette tapes, would last forever, and that my collection would grow along with me and last me a lifetime. And then, of course, the iPod happened. And then streaming services, and everything changed. Up until very recently I was incredibly resistant to the new ways of listening to music. I still have a CD player in my car - and I still use it! I still love CDs to an unreasonable degree. And my daughter recently got a Discman (I have no idea how) and has been dipping into my collection.
But something has shifted in me in the last couple years. I don't think about the numbers anymore. I don't think about collecting. I just listen. In some ways this digital development has freed me to be obsessed not with CDs, but with music itself. As a result, my palate has expanded, and I'm branching out and trying new things - allowing new kinds of music into my ears and heart. I find myself appreciating genres and artists I wouldn't have given a chance before.
There's a book on my shelf that says on the cover, "The more you love music, the more music you love." I have found that to be truer and truer since letting go of the numbers game.

Rector’s Blog, Your Perfect Christmas - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

As you are reading this, Christmas is about to happen. And you are probably anxious about at least one thing, probably several. Some of your anxiety is obvious and conscious and articulable: You still have shopping to do, your house is a mess, people are coming over, what will you wear, how will you cook everything and wrap everything? Some of what you're feeling is inexpressible but just as palpable: Sheer anxiety shooting through your subconscious, silently running the numbers on all the ways things could go wrong.I wish you could see the cards hanging in my Dining Room. I wish you could hold in your heart just how beautiful things can be on the day that things go wrong, when they are chaotic beyond imagination.I am giving you permission to screw up this Christmas. I am giving you permission to overcook something. Or undercook it. Or both. Break a plate. Stain something irreparably. Bring up politics even though everyone knows you should NOT BRING UP POLITICS. You can be too cranky or get the wrong gift. You can disappoint yourself, and you can even disappoint someone else. I know you don't want any of these things. I know this. It's not like you're trying to screw up. You want to get it right and I want you to get it right. And also, even if you do all the wrong things, God is showing up.I want to invite you to make love the center of your Christmas. Not flawlessness: Love. Not met expectations: Love. Not simplicity: Love. Not idealism: Love.

Rector’s Blog, When We Are Talking - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Do I always know what I believe or why? No. No I don't. I have made a decision to be a religious Christian. Sometimes it makes sense to me and sometimes it doesn't. For me, religion is similar to marriage in that, I don't get to be all in only when it makes sense to me or when I feel like it. One day a long time ago I realized I believed in God and that I needed to take that seriously, and I have spent much of my life since then trying to do just that, however imperfectly. And here we are.I remember one skeptical ex-Christian friend of mine asking me, "But how do you know for sure that you're right?" And I surprised him by quickly answering, "Oh, I'm not sure at all." I could be wrong about Jesus. I could be wrong about all of this. But I have decided and am still deciding to try to live my life as if there is a God and that God is Love and that Love has something to do with me. This is the best I can do.

Rector’s Blog, When You Have Enough Faith - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I feel like I'm missing some deep sense of certainty. I mentioned this last week, as I opined about how I wish God had given us more certainty. I expressed annoyance that faith, by definition, apparently requires uncertainty - otherwise it wouldn't be faith. When I was writing that I was thinking mostly about my frustration with God for not making things more obvious.
And, hey, it's all well and good to blame God for things. But I often find that when I am blaming others or feeling resentful, I'm really just deflecting feelings about my own shortcomings. And I probably do that with God. So today I want to give God a break and turn attention toward myself and my own faith inferiority complex. Which is to say, somehow when the conversation comes to faith, I think I can be doing better. But I don't really know what better looks like.
Maybe you experience this: the feeling that somehow, you're supposed to be doing something you're not, or you're supposed to be "better" at something without actually knowing what "better" is. That nebulous ideal, better.

Rector’s Blog, When I Don’t Want to Believe - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

There's a line in Scriptures that says faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. I just cannot tell you how much I don't want this to be true. I don't want to hope for things, and I don't want to have conviction in unseen things.
For many years this was a big stumbling block for any kind of religious pursuit for me. I believed in God, but I didn't want to believe in God: I wanted to prove God's existence and get it over with. At that time it seemed pretty clear to me that loving my enemy and praying for those who persecute me and turning the other cheek and giving money away without any desire for reimbursement, and forgiving without reservation and loving without condition would all be much more doable if I knew without a doubt that there was a God and that God unquestionably wanted me to do these things. I was prepared to be obedient if God was prepared to convince me.

Rector’s Blog, Why I’m Religious and Mostly Ok with it - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Let's get the obvious reason out on the table first: I am religious because I grew up religious and it feels very natural to me. I left church for a while and stopped being religious. This happened when I decided I could not be part of an organization that wasn't gay-friendly (which is the language we used at the time). But when I recommitted myself to the Christian faith and found a church compatible with my values, becoming religious again seemed very natural. I was raised with the understanding that believing in God meant making specific and regular time for that relationship a basic part of my life. It was easy not to be religious when I wasn't sure I believed in God, but once, as an adult, I realized I believed - finding practical ways to practice that belief just made sense to me.
I want to be clear that this is not the same as saying religion is comforting. I hear people say that religion is comforting, and I guess if your goal is to have something that reinforces the notion of life after death and a benevolent force in the universe, then yes that is comforting. It actually is. But my experience of being religious has often been very inconvenient. It is demanding. Being religious has forced me to confront ideas that challenge and upset me, that push and confuse me. Religion means having to deal with and be invested in other people even when I don't want to.
Another reason I am religious is that I cannot always be spiritual. As I said, I used to be spiritual but not religious. I had a spiritual awakening in my younger days, and it was not in a church - it was on a cliffside trail overlooking a beautiful body of water and it was deeply mystical and a moment of deep spiritual awe.

Rector’s Blog, Why I Believe in Jesus for Now - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I want to begin with the easiest, most obvious, truth about my belief in Jesus - and it's also the one that is the easiest to dismiss. I was raised Christian. My parents were Christians who baptized me as an infant and raised me in a church community. I don't remember a time in my life when God wasn't part of the equation. And I don't remember a time when I took seriously the possibility of being another religion.
I think it's better to be honest about that. I know saying it out loud opens me up to the observation that if I'd been raised Muslim I'd be a Muslim, if I'd been raised Sikh I'd be Sikh, if I'd been raised Jewish I'd be Jewish, and so on. And that is very likely. It would be really impressive if I could say I studied every single religion in depth and then chose Christianity, but that is not what happened. I did not choose Christianity. I did not find Jesus. Christianity chose me. Jesus found me. This is indefensible, and I believe it. Jesus found me.
This, by the way, is called indoctrination. I would like to write more about indoctrination in the future - I think it is misunderstood and gets a bad rap. But for now I'll just say, I don't believe it's possible not to indoctrinate our children. The question is into what shall we indoctrinate them? I am choosing love. Specifically, I am choosing the magnificent, faithful, gracious, sacrificial love of God that I see present in Jesus.
If I was ever going to be anything other than Christian, I would have been an atheist. For much of my life I have been tempted by atheism. Because many times God seems so implausible. But instead of ever really being an atheist, I keep believing in Jesus...