Dear People of Christ Church,
I’m delighted to be back writing in this space again, and so grateful for our ministry together as well as the space for reflection and time away. Thanks to senior warden Victoria Sundgren and junior warden Sasha Killewald for holding down the fort when I was away, and especially for Sasha’s kind words in this space two weeks ago about my work! Parish ministry really is a strange and wonderful, and most particularly, shared thing. Christ Church didn’t belong to Frederic Fales, the first rector of Christ Church (though our parish halls are now named for him), and it doesn’t belong to me. The ministry of this place belongs to God, and we individually and jointly are honored to participate in it.

This year when I was away, I found myself returning to the idea of wilderness. Much of our vacation this year was in Utah—canyons and red rock wilderness that stretches for miles and miles and miles, climate and landscape totally unlike the northeast. Mostly we hiked, and mostly the beasts of the wild kept to their own corners—except one backcountry trip when a rattlesnake got too tail-shakingly close to 5 year old Adah and we woke to find that a mountain lion had been through our campsite. Creation is a complicated place—we humans imagine that we are at the top, but it’s not that simple.

One of the most striking experiences we had over vacation was visiting first Mesa Verde National Park, and then the Ute Mountain Tribal Park just over the border in New Mexico. Both are home to literally millions of artifacts of the ancestral pueblo people who lived in the area between around 650 and 1300. We toured cave dwellings and pit houses with guides from the National Park Service Mesa Verde and with a Ute guide at the tribal park, and the views of history are so different. At the Ute Tribal Park, the artifacts were scattered around. Black and white pottery sherds were in mounds not far from the side of the road, exposed to wind and rain and, even more perilously, eight year olds. We picked through them and found our favorite designs. At Mesa Verde, artifacts like that were behind glass—old-style museum history, not living history. The National Park Service guide talked about the astonishing mystery of why such an archaeologically advanced culture would pick up and leave—maybe drought, maybe warfare, crop failure or over hunting. The Ute guide just said that it became clear to them that it was time to leave, so they left. It was time. They were supposed to go at one time, and supposed to leave at another. Allowing the artifacts be where they were was part of honoring the past.

Planning fall liturgy with Daniel, our director of music, our relationship to the past is a living question. Instead of potsherds, we have prayers. We worship a living God who moves in our lives today, but our forms are 2000 years old. How often do we sing the traditional Gloria, how often a more contemporary song that praises God in different language? How do we “sing to the Lord a new song” (Psalm 96) in our lives today?

Blessings,
Sara+