Feast of Saint Aidan & Blessing of the Marriage of Nicole Miller and Tim Fabatz
1 Cor 9:16-23; Mt 19:27-30
The Rev'd Cameron Partridge
September 1, 2024
Good morning, St. Aidan’s. Welcome to the Feats of Aidan of Lindisfarne, patron of this congregation (and of St. Aidan’s in Bolinas!), whose feast we celebrate today. As I pondered this occasion as well as the Season of Creation[1] into which we begin to pivot on this day, I was reminded of a chapter in a book lent to me by our own Susan Spencer several years ago. The book is Christ of the Celts by J. Philip Newell, and the chapter is an account of a profound experience Newell had in his teen years. He writes,
I woke up in the middle of the night and was aware of the presence of Christ. He did not say anything to me verbally, but his posture spoke powerfully and reassuringly. It was a dark room, so I was able to see only the outline of his form. He was seated on a chair immediately next to my bed. His body was inclined toward me. His head was tilted. He leaned forward with total attention. My experience was that Christ was looking to the heart of my being, with love.
The next day, when I went to school, my best friend looked at me and said, ‘Philip, what has happened to you?’ I am ashamed to say I did not tell him. And I did not tell anyone for decades.[2]
This deep reassurance that Newell immediately felt upon seeing this mysterious figure, his powerful experience of support, of being fully known and cared for, makes me think of a prayer we share at Evening Prayer each week: “keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep.”[3] This was Christ keeping watch. “Incline your ear, O God,” we hear many times over in scriptural passages, such as the Psalms (e.g. Psalm 86:1; Psalm 116:2). This was Christ inclining his whole frame with loving attentiveness. For over thirty-five years Newell made his way through life supported by an awareness of Christ’s loving inclination, the tilt of divine care perceiving his heart. Ever since, he has caried that heart with him – as his schoolmate had so immediately remarked.
The gentle presence at the heart of Newell’s account reminds me of the character of Aidan of Lindisfarne, the seventh century monastic and bishop after whom our congregation is named. Aidan was an Irish-born monk who had come to reside on the isle of Iona off the western coast of Scotland. He was sent by King Oswald of Northumbria to carry on the work of previous leaders such as Bishop Paulinus of York, reviving and establishing Christian communities in the area. As St. Aidanite Marilyn Geist wrote years ago in the summary in today’s booklet, Aidan was given this charge after another monk, “a bleak and severe man” named Corman, had fallen short. “Perhaps you have been too hard, expecting fruit when the trees were still saplings,” Aidan had remarked, and, Geist wrote, “as happens to those who speak up, [Aidan] was promptly consecrated bishop and given the job.” He established a monastic center of learning on the isle of Lindisfarne off the northeast coast of England, “mak[ing] of its rock a cradle of Christianity,” as Bonnie Thurston wrote in our first reading.[4] Accessible by foot at low tide, Lindisfarne was a decidedly liminal location: Aidan would embark from there to sites throughout the region, planting and building up communities. Back at Lindisfarne, he formed leaders for those communities – originally twelve, echoing Jesus’ core apostolic group referenced in our gospel reading.[5] Everywhere Aidan went, he was known as a loving, “gentle monk,” as Geist phrases him in “We Sing of Aidan.” Geist’s words follow the lead of the eighth century historian the Venerable Bede who wrote of Aidan, “He cultivated peace and love, unity and humility; he was above anger and greed, and despised pride and conceit.”[6] He made his way through the world with authentic presence, bringing the vibrant light of Christ everywhere he went and meeting people where they were, that they might come to bear that light in and through their own lives and communities, to share in its blessings, as Paul wrote in our second reading.
And indeed, if perhaps Paul’s phrase, “I have become all things to all people” (1 Cor 9:22), also in today’s passage from his first letter to the Corinthians, sounds diffuse and ambiguous to our ears, the witness of Aidan and Newell might help us hear it in the light of Christ’s compassionate presence. I have turned to you. I have abided with you, as we’ve heard these last several weeks in John’s gospel. I incline toward you with every fiber of my being, and I invite you to do the same. Incline toward one another with abiding love, that all may share in my blessings.
Among the blessings we have the privilege of celebrating this morning is the marriage of two of our own, Nicole Miller and Tim Fabatz. Tim and Nicole married last year in Hawaii, but they wanted to celebrate with us as well. And so we are gathering around them in the context of our worship today, sharing in the blessing of their relationship, their marriage and, we might say through the lens of Aidan’s life, their pilgrimage. It is not every week that a Sunday morning has the privilege of being the context for such a blessing – most such occasions take place on a different day, often a Saturday. Yet our prayer book and supplemental liturgies envision just the sort of blessing we are sharing in today.[7] This community lifts up its participants in so many different ways, day by day, week by week. We support one another in living out in adventurous, anchoring faith the journey that is this life. We sing in joy, in sorrow, in perseverance and love, as we do today with new vigor at the return of our choir for a new season. We nourish one another here in this neighborhood, a practice especially important to Tim and Nicole who each in their own ways join others here in support our feeding ministries from the Food Pantry to Diamond Diners to our neighborhood Thanksgiving meal. Nicole and Tim, as part of us, and we as part of them; all of us as a community anchored in this particular neighborhood, branches of Christ’s living, nurturing, loving body; bear Christ’s light. What a beautiful dimension of our celebration of Aidan’s Feast.
I noted earlier that for years J. Philip Newell felt unable to share his young experience of Christ’s presence. What was it that shifted his sense of reserve about it? How did it become a story he felt called to tell? Decades later, he was staying in New Mexico for a writer’s week. It was winter.
The trees surrounding the portal of my little dwelling were still stripped bare. And as I sat out under the open skies, and the stars in their brilliance seemed closer to me than I had ever experienced them, I was aware that the poplars with their willowy branches were inclining towards the portal. Then everything I could see in the darkness of that night and in the infinite stretches of space above me, the shimmering planets and glistening galaxies – they were all inclining with Presence. And I knew it was for us all, and I was set free to speak.[8
In Christ, God has inclined toward us, toward all creation, with Presence. It was for us all, for all creation. And we, we are meant to be set free to share in that loving tilt, to bear it out into the world in our own iterations of glimmering brilliance. Thanks be to God for that Presence, for that incline, for the deep love that surrounds and upholds us in and through all things, for the love and light, the flame, that we bear out into the world.
Let us pray:
O Christ, in whom the fullness of God dwells,
you are deep within our lives and all life,
you are deep within this place and every place.
In this place and this time and in the depths of our own souls
we draw from the inner well of your love
that we too might be filled with the fullness of God
and that you might do within us and in our world
far more than we could ever ask or imagine. Amen.[9]
[2] J. Philip Newell, Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 2008), 108-109.
[3] Evening Prayer II., The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 1979), 124.
[4] Bonnie Thurston, Belonging to Borders: A Sojourn in the Celtic Tradition (Liturgical Press, 2011), 18.
[5] “Aidan, St.” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 31.
[6] As quoted by Geist. Another translation of this description, and a fuller account of Aidan, can be found in Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price (Penguin Random House, 1995), Book III.17, p. 170 (and throughout Book III).
[7] The Blessing of a Civil Marriage in The Book of Common Prayer, 433-434. The Blessing of a Civil Marriage 2 in Liturgical Resources 2, 25: https://extranet.generalconvention.org/staff/files/download/21226
[8] Newell, Christ of the Celts, 117-118
[9] J. Philip Newell, Celtic Treasure: Daily Scripture and Prayer (Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press, 2005), 234.
Commenti