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

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.
Want to support our podcast?
Give Here
or if you can't access the link, see it here: https://redeemercincy.tpsdb.com/Give/podcast

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.

Want to support our podcast?
Give Here
or if you can't access the link, see it here: https://redeemercincy.tpsdb.com/Give/podcast

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.

Want to support our podcast?
Give Here or if you can't access the link, see it here: https://redeemercincy.tpsdb.com/Give/podcast

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.
Give Here
or if you can't access the link, see it here: https://redeemercincy.tpsdb.com/Give/podcast

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?
Give Here
or if you can't access the link, see it here:https://redeemercincy.tpsdb.com/Give/podcast

Rector’s Blog, Holy Dying - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

What is your prayer when you know someone is going to die? So many of my prayers for the sick and dying are centered around their return to health, for a cure, for an end to the disease, for a reversal of fortunes. Sometimes a prayer for healing is a reasonable request. Other times I pray for a miracle. To be clear whether healing seems reasonable or realistic or not, I should pray for it if it is what I hope and wish for. Sometimes it's exactly the thing I need to pray. Sometimes "heal them" is the only thing that makes sense to me.
I remember kneeling in front of the bed and praying for my dad to be healed while paramedics were working on his body in the hallway around the corner. He was already dead, had been dead when they showed up, but there I was praying for healing. I don't judge myself for that prayer. It's what I wanted. I asked for what I wanted. And I don't judge God for not making it so. There is so little I understand about life and death and how it all rests in the heart of the God who made us. God, my dad, me - we all did our part in that moment.
Death shows up. What is our prayer?
One of the great gifts of my job is the sheer number of times it puts me in close contact with death. I am invited into the room where a person will die, invited to pray over them, to thank God for their life. To witness the tears of their loved ones, to shed my own tears. There is heaviness there. It is not a joy. It takes a piece out of me. And also, I have come to see it as a gift. Death carries with it a sort of holiness. An ending that is shared by every living thing. We hold it in common. I have stumbled into the practice of praying for a holy death when I find out someone is dying. I have learned to pray this without flinching. Because I believe there is such a thing as holy dying.

Rector’s Blog, When I Became an Episcopalian - Part 3 - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

" I had been taught Evil was about satanic rituals and Ouija boards and heavy metal music and people loving someone they shouldn't. This priest changed my understanding in one fell swoop. And then she spoke passionately of Jesus. In Los Angeles. To Episcopalians. She spoke about Jesus' clear and consistent advocacy for the love, the humanization, the belonging of all people. And she spoke of how, while she lay in the hospital healing from her wounds, Jesus healed her heart and allowed her to choose love instead of hate as she persisted in the holy work for justice and equity.
That night I sat in this space where this Christian woman connected the spiritual and the practical with articulation, where she connected the actual issues of love and mercy and equality and violence and hatred and fear with the story of how God is working in the world and where Jesus shows up.
That Sunday I showed up. I worshiped with them for the first time."
Give Here
or if you can't access the link, see it here: https://redeemercincy.tpsdb.com/Give/onetimegift

Rector’s Blog, When I Became an Episcopalian - Part 2 - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Do you believe you can be yourself at church? Do you think you can be yourself in front of God? I don't like admitting that I've had problems with this my whole life. I remember during the years when I was unaffiliated with church and was actively questioning if I even believed in anything. I could never bring myself to say I wasn't Christian, because what if I died in that moment and went to Hell? What is that other than the belief that you can't be your whole self in front of God?
That night I was at a table with people who all believed different things and said that aloud. A couple of lifelong Episcopalians who never had serious doubts. A gay Christian who loved Jesus and felt safe being himself at this church. One guy who said he wasn't sure he bought any of it but was there to sort things out. And me - a former fundamentalist turned spiritual-but-not-religious agnostic conservative liberal Jesus lover who'd had a recent conversion experience and was just trying to understand how to be Christian again. And we were all together. It was such a mess. Thank God.
The third thing I remember is the cookies.

Rector’s Blog, When I Became an Episcopalian - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Shortly thereafter I moved to Los Angeles, which was about an hour from where I grew up, and started going to the farmer's market on Sundays. I wanted to be a Christian, but I didn't know how. Some people say you can be Christian on your own terms and all by yourself. Maybe they're right. My experience has been otherwise. Community is central to this faith. It would be like saying you can be married on your own terms and all by yourself. It became clear to me that I wasn't going to believe in Jesus all by myself. I was going to have to try to find a church that I could stand and that could stand me. I wanted my life to look like I meant it.
I decided to give the farmer's market a break and go to church. But the idea of finding a new church was overwhelming. So I just started driving back to my hometown and taking my Grandma to our old church. The one I had left. The one I didn't know what to do with. I knew the first Sunday that it wasn't my place anymore. But I kept going for a couple months. I still loved the pastor there very much. And I loved my Grandma. Sometimes I'd come down the night before and do my laundry at her house. Then my clean clothes would smell like her cigarettes for a week. We'd sit in the same pew as when I was growing up. The people who remembered me seemed happy to see me. When the offering plate came around, my Grandma would slip me a $5 bill so I wouldn't be empty-handed. She always did it without making eye contact, like we were dealing in contraband.
It wasn't my church anymore. It wasn't going to be. I wasn't angry or bitter. I just didn't belong there anymore. And one Sunday I skipped. I slept in. And I called up my buddies to see who was going to the farmer's market. They were all sleeping in that day and I was definitely not going to go by myself. I resigned myself to a quiet morning. A few minutes later, my roommate peaked his head into my room. He and I were friendly enough but not really friends. We rarely hung out. We certainly didn't go places together. He said, "Hey I'm thinking of going to the farmer's market. You wanna go?"

Nourished by Ritual - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Do you remember the bowls you used for your breakfast cereal as a child? I do. We had these light blue hard plastic bowls with rims on them. I ate cereal every morning without fail. Somehow my kids have managed to get us to make them eggs or pancakes or waffles from time to time. When I was growing up, if we had eggs or pancakes for breakfast it was probably a holiday. Waffles were for brunch buffets. Day in and day out I ate cereal out of one of those blue bowls.
Maybe it wasn't cereal bowls for you. Maybe you can close your eyes and immediately picture the plates and flatware you used at the dinner table, or the glass you used for juice. What is it for you? Can you see it?
These things were not, in themselves, spectacular. They were simply there every day. They did not need to prove themselves as flawlessly designed. We don't remember them for being particularly beautiful. We remember them because we used them over and over again for years. I can still remember placing the bowl on the coffee table in the family room then sliding down the couch onto the floor - because if I sat on the couch itself, the bowl would be too low. So I'd sit criss-cross on the floor and that blue bowl overstuffed with cereal and milk would be just below my chin, and that way I wouldn't spill and maybe my mom wouldn't notice I hadn't used a placemat. I realize now I loved it there.