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

WLSU, Ad Advent Progress Report - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

How is the buildup to Christmas going for you? Are you experiencing hope and joy and all that? Are you being festive enough? Are you feeling all the correct feelings? I want to take this opportunity to remind you that there is no one right way to experience Christmas. Our feelings and expectations surrounding Christmas are endlessly complicated and there's no reason for us to pretend otherwise.
In the church we call the post-Thanksgiving pre-Christmas season Advent: It's a word which, aptly, means "coming" - as in, "Oh no Christmas is coming and we are not ready." Funny enough, most of the Bible readings assigned for Advent aren't about the joy of Christmas - they are about the surprise, dread, hope, fear, and expectation that accompanies Jesus showing up. As in, "Oh no, Jesus is coming and we are not ready."
There is no perfect Christmas. There is no way to get it all right. There is no way to win. And yet we fret every year as if our worrying will bring about perfection.
I have never had a perfect Christmas. But I love this season so much. I love it in its ridiculousness and tension. I love the songs and early dark and the lights. I'm 44 and I'm realizing I don't care at all what my presents are (so long as I get some). I wouldn't mind a Toblerone in my stocking. Mostly I just want it to snow, I want to sing Christmas carols at church, and I want to watch Christmas Vacation.
But I know. I know even though I make it sound like I'm easy to please, that I am no different than you. I too am carrying complicated feelings and hopes into the next few days.

WLSU, We Almost Died - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

So the heater didn't get fixed last spring. And we forgot about it because it was getting warmer. And now here we were in Late November, with a few freezing nights under our belt, and my wife's office is generally too cold. She had been using a space heater, but we knew that could not be the solution for the next few months: That would blow up our electric bill, and of course space heaters can be dangerous. After dragging our feet for a couple weeks, my wife finally called an HVAC technician with whom we'd worked last year. Almost as an afterthought, she asked him to just check on our furnace too while he's at our house.
The technician shows up and takes a look at our radiant heater. And it's working. As in, nothing is wrong with it. There was no reason for us to call. It just works. It was not working before. Now it is. He shrugs and goes off to the furnace. He runs some tests, comes back upstairs and says the heat exchange is cracked on our furnace and it is blowing carbon monoxide all over the place. He says he thinks it's just blowing outside through the exhaust, have we noticed anything inside?
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WLSU, Childish Things - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

A couple weeks ago I spoke/wrote about growing up, about maturing. And now we're talking about playing Nintendo. But I've been thinking about the things that shaped us in our youth, about what we did with them as we grew up. In one of Paul's letters to a church he (somewhat passive aggressively) tells them that when he was a child he did childish things, but when he grew up it was time to put childish things away. What did you put away when you grew up? What did you let go of?

Some people put away Christianity when they grow up. And I can't say I blame them much of the time. I do not believe God is a fairy tale. I do believe much of the way we have experienced Christianity is childish. As a teacher of mine used to say, the church in America is structured for spiritual infancy. What he meant was that Christianity as we know it is often does not push us to grow. And when we do grow, our churches don't know how to grow with us. So we abandon Christianity. Or, what's worse, we hold onto a version of Christianity that doesn't grow and mature even as we do.

I am fully capable of spiritual immaturity.

WLSU, Multitasking Gratitude - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I am thinking today about gratitude. I am thinking about what it means to be thankful. It is not possible to be thankful all the time. I can't feel any one feeling all the time. Sometimes I think I'm supposed to always feel good, or happy, or confident - and that is an unreasonable expectation to place on myself. But I can seek to focus on gratitude for this life.
Quite often God is in my presence, showing me attention and care, sharing this life with me. But I get distracted. I say I'm multitasking, but really, I'm choosing to focus on something else. Probably my phone. I'm juggling a lot, and not all of it is good. Not all of it is good. I want to say that out loud, because toxic positivity and delusional gratitude are real: The fanatical push to make everything ok is tempting in religious circles. Not everything is ok. Nobody knows that better than God.
But where will I place my focus? With which eyes will I look at this moment?
Thanksgiving is underrated. It used to signal the beginning of the Holiday Season

When Love Shows Up - Growing Up - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I have a confession to make. I love being an adult. I get to stay up past my bedtime. I get to drive a car. I have to work, sure, but I also get to work - get to do something I love and learn how to get better at it. I will never have to take another math test, never get another detention. Sure, I went bald, but now I don't get hat hair. I get to have a beard. I watch R-Rated movies. I eat my kids' Halloween candy after they go to bed. I have two dogs! I had one and wanted another one, so I got another one! It was a terrible idea, but it was my terrible idea and all I had to do was be willing to live with the consequences!
I didn't much like being a kid, to be honest. It's not like I had a bad childhood. I wasn't trying to escape. But from a very young age, I believed that I would enjoy being an adult so much more. And then I grew up and I was right. This is what I've been waiting for. All the stressors I described before are still true. It's very very difficult, this adulting. But I love it. I love being grown-up.
It's painful and it's scary. I both laugh and cry more readily than I ever did as a child. It's all more terrible and beautiful than I ever could have imagined.
I know our culture is obsessed with youth; that we are programmed to look backward and yearn for an idealized version of who we once were, to long for younger bodies and simpler times. I do it too. Some of it is about being scared of death. Some of it is wishing we could have had the ability to comprehend back then just how precious time was when everything seemed endless and ageless and eternal. And some of it is the legitimate annoyance that if I sleep wrong tonight, I will be sore for three days.

When Love Shows Up - Trust Women - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Every time Jesus interacts with a woman in the Gospel narratives, she leaves with her humanity, her dignity affirmed. Every time. So, it makes sense that Christians should actively support the full humanity, dignity, and autonomy of women. This should not be controversial. Supporting abortion rights is not contrary to following Jesus. Supporting abortion rights, at its core, is about trusting people who are pregnant to make decisions for what is happening within their body. It is their body.
I used to think it was my job to protect the life that was growing inside other people. That belief was rooted in the idea that I knew what was right for others, for their bodies. I believed that I should have a say. I believed that it was a woman's job to do whatever she had to do in order to protect that life no matter what, even if that meant being forced to do so. I believed I was standing up for the dignity of the unborn, but in doing so, I put myself in the position of undermining and even ignoring the dignity of the woman. I am short-circuiting her autonomy instead of affirming and supporting it. I can no longer do that. Jesus won't let me.
There is a famous moment in the Gospel stories when Jesus calls out the religious leaders of his time, saying, "You are placing burdens on people they can never bear!" Jesus was talking to me. He was talking to all of us who believe we know what is right for others, and especially those of us who use laws to place unbearable burdens on others.
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When Love Shows Up - The Silence - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

This week the Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital in Gaza was hit with a missile and over 400 people died. The hospital is a ministry of the Anglican Church in Jerusalem - with much of its funding coming directly from Episcopalians in America. The bishop who oversees this hospital is a dear friend, and a peaceful man. You have heard of this horrific missile strike. How did you feel when it was reported as an Israeli missile? How did you feel when you then heard reports that it was a Palestinian missile? Did one sound better to you than the other? Which culprit was preferable for the story you are telling about what is happening? I know what my preference was.
I wonder if the children who were killed care who was responsible.
Our need to have a clear cut take on what is happening unites us with Job's friends. It somehow feels safer if we can unabashedly Stand with Israel or Free Palestine. We can choose our story and roll our eyes at the obviousness of it all. We can avoid our grief and focus on our outrage.

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Rector’s Blog, Good Grief - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I have lived a few places now: several rounds in Southern California - both in Orange County and Los Angeles, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, North Carolina, Virginia, and now Cincinnati Ohio. Most of these places have felt like home at one point or another. I am always happy to go back to any of these places to visit. At the same time, it's just that: A visit. I need to consult Google maps to get places I used to know by memory. I imagine alternate realities where I never left California in the first place, or where I never left New England, or where I settled down in Charlotte. So many things I was, and so many I could've been. There's beauty in that, and also some grief.

Grief is different than regret. I do not wish I had made different decisions, that my life was different. It's not that. It's just an acknowledgment of all the loss that life brings.

We have a desire to demonize grief, to minimize it or stifle it completely if possible. And when experiencing grief there is some part of us that feels guilty, like we should not be feeling this, like it's maudlin or overly sensitive. Our goal seems to be to get through grief as quickly as we can. I wonder why that is. Christians can be particularly problematic. We will often try to short-circuit grief by pointing to God's plan or the promise of Heaven. As if our belief that everything is going to be ok means that we should not experience grief.

But grief is not evil. Grief is a gift, because it is honest about the things that we have lost.

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Rector’s Blog, Got To Get You Into My Life - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I remember recently witnessing a friend of mine being painfully misunderstood, and I remember thinking if only the people who misunderstood her really knew her, they would love her too. How could they not?
It's interesting though, this idea that loving someone is meant as a compliment. Love as seal of approval. As if the love we give someone is a sign that they are worth loving, that they have earned it, that their character has somehow merited our love. Even though that's almost never been our experience of love. People may earn our trust. People may earn our respect, our esteem, our appreciation. But our love works differently and we know it. It wasn't my trust the Beatles won over that day in the booth of that vaguely Hawaiian-themed restaurant.
The phrase is to know them is to love them. But I think I've begun to believe the opposite. I think I believe now that to love someone is to know them.
It is the Christian belief that God is love.
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Rector’s Blog, Becoming a Runner - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I was a runner once about 12 years ago. I don't just mean that I ran once. I mean I became a runner. I had jogged now and again growing up, but was never a runner. Then one day I thought to myself, I'm gonna run a half-marathon. I cannot tell you exactly why, other than I was 31 and at the beginning of my marriage and the beginning of my career, and was about to have a child and was still very much of the mindset that I had something to prove. Is there such a thing as a 1/3rd life crisis?
I'm not so sure I don't still have something to prove.
Anyway, I decided to run a half-marathon because I wanted to prove I could. That was it. Can a short stubby out-of-shape guy in his 30's run a long way very slowly? It turns out I could. I had a friend who was a runner, and I asked her to train me. And she did. I trained. I followed her schedule. I got running shorts, and running shoes, and BodyGlide - which is what they call an anti-chafing balm, and a little water bottle I could attach to my hand. I ran long distances and listened to podcasts and took ice baths. I ran two half-marathons before a combination of shin splints and a new baby sidelined my burgeoning career and I hung up my Brooks sneakers.
But here's my question: When did I become a runner?
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