THE CHRISTOPHER, MAY, 2008

THE CHRISTOPHER, MAY, 2008
C. Davies Reed, Associate Rector
Last week, during the 150th Celebration of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary I came upon a plaque at the entrance of a friend’s home which reads, “Bidden or Not Bidden, God is Present.” I love that. I researched the phrase and discovered the following.
The phrase is most frequently attributed to Carl Jung, a psychologist, who is reported to have posted this phrase not only by his front door, but also engraved on his gravestone. The phrase comes from the Latin, “vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit.” Translated it means roughly the same thing as the English, although not quite as poetic. Jung discovered it when studying Erasmus. The phrase comes from the Oracle at Delphi which gave it as the answer to the Spartans when they were planning a war against Athens. Regardless of how it came to be in my world, “Bidden or Not Bidden, God is Present” is a great quote.
Those words stuck with me because, while my seminary is celebrating its 150th birthday, it is, at the same time, undergoing a complete restructuring and re-envisioning of who it is and what its purpose is to be. My seminary is experiencing a kind of death with the hope that it will experience a subsequent resurrection. Unlike our hope of resurrection, the seminary’s will depend, just a little, on on-going financial stability. None-the-less, this theme of death and resurrection has been rather poignant in our lives at St. Christopher’s this month as we have experienced three deaths, one right after the other, in the sure and certain hope of resurrection. This has been a heavy month. It does not really matter that Jack Barney, Dottie Cross and Nancy Jonathan each was in failing health; what matters is that three times in four days we came together as a faith community to celebrate the lives of God’s loved children. It came to us hard and it came to us heavy and it makes us sad. But it is not nearly as heavy as being the spouse, or parent, or child, or step-child of one of these who has passed. It is not nearly as heavy as coming in touch with a common everyday thing and having the flood of grief descend all over again. I am particularly aware of this after the week of events, but it is true each time any one of our loved ones passes, expectedly or unexpectedly.
What are we to do when we unexpectedly get hit with a flood of grief? Platitudes about how our loved ones suffering is abated or how we should “buck-up, and carry on like they would want us to do” don’t help. What we need to remember and to carry in our souls is that we are not alone when we most feel alone. We are not abandoned when we most feel abandoned. And this is true even when we are angry at God for taking the loved one from us and when we blame God for “causing” all this grief to come into our lives. “Bidden or Not Bidden, God is Present.”
At the Sesquicentennial Eucharist at Seabury, the Bishop of Chicago, Jeffrey Lee preached. He asked how we might give thanks for the challenges God puts before us. He referred to terrorist attacks, natural disasters and the restructuring of the seminary and suggested that there are ways in which we could give thanks as we move through tragedy and times of sadness in the hope of resurrection and new life. I wonder if we, too, can find ways to give thanks for the dark and sad times, the times when we hurt most, when we are angriest with God. That we are able to survive these times and slowly begin to live into a new day is a tall order, especially after decades of friendship, marriage and relationship. Perhaps, sometimes the only thing we may have to give thanks for is that God has not left our side. We are not alone. No matter where we are, no matter how we feel, we can count on one thing with absolute certainty, “Bidden or Not Bidden, God is Present.”