Dancing in the Eye of the Hurricane

 Trinity Sunday, Grace Episcopal Church, Monroe, La.

I received the Summer 2021 issue of The Anglican Digest in the mail about a week and a half ago. If you’re not a subscriber, it’s easy to become one. If you are, I want you to go home and look at two things.

The first is a photo of the beautiful Regina window in our chapel. It’s on p. 37 and I’m happy to say it’s a rather nice reproduction of one of my photographs.

The second is a diagram of the Trinity….

Anglican Digest, 2021 Summer Issue, p. 23.

 

Timely, right? Because today is Trinity Sunday—the one day in the church year devoted to a point of theology, rather than a person or an event.

 

When I first laid eyes on this diagram in the Anglican Digest, I thought, “Nice!” This works pretty well! Maybe we should have it translated into a lovely banner—royal blue background, gold circles and bands, black embroidered words on the gold—and then we could bring it out once a year, place it at the top of the chancel steps and all gaze at it for 20 minutes, thereby relieving the clergy of ever having to struggle with a Trinity Sunday sermon again!

 

But, of course, the longer I look at it, the less adequate it seems. Useful, yes. It does remind us that our One God is a perfect unity of three distinct persons. It also balances the inverted triangle on its point, the Holy Spirit. This makes me ask the question, Why isn’t the church as packed on Pentecost as it is on Easter and Christmas? Surely the gift of the Holy Spirit is on a par with the gift of the Son?

 

But however useful diagrams can be, ultimately God can’t be reduced to circles and lines and words, a bit of geometry and language—two very human maps for understanding and translating the universe. This diagram—no diagram of human making—can adequately express the experience of God in our lives. And that’s what I want to talk about this morning: The experience of God in our lives.

 

A few years ago, a pop artist named Brandi Carlile published a song called “The Eye.” The key lyric—the hook, the line repeated in every chorus—is, “You can dance in a hurricane if you’re standing in the eye.”

 

Striking imagery. And my immediate response was, “The title of my memoir—when I get around to writing it—will be ‘Dancing in the Eye of the Hurricane.’”

 

Because that’s how I experience the Triune God and God’s call and claim on my life.

 

God comes to us disguised as our life. Writer Paula D’Arcy said that in a wonderful book I recommend called Practicing Resurrection. And those words clearly resonate with lots of folks besides myself, because the quote is now available as a poster, on a t-shirt, printed on.. whatever.

 

Hear it again: God comes to us disguised as our life.

 

And life is a lot like a hurricane. Sometimes we dance along happily and competently in the relative calm of the eye. And then we miss a step or the roiling turmoil around us lurches in an unexpected direction, and we are bouncing off the walls. It takes time to get back into that eye where we can dance again, and only in retrospect can we see that God was in it… and we in God... the whole time.

 

Many times getting bludgeoned by the winds of the hurricane is exactly how we encounter God’s call and claim on us in a way we cannot ignore. I was first called to teaching. And that call came by way of the really messy business of a marriage ending badly. After careening about for a time wondering where in heaven’s name that had come from, I was left with the task of reinventing myself.

 

In my 30’s, I went back to school to get a Bachelor’s degree, got to be a teaching assistant while still an undergraduate, taught my first class the summer after I graduated, went straight to graduate school, and began teaching full time in the fall of 1990.

 

And although I retired from ULM 3 years ago, I’m still teaching. And it is a calling. Teaching matters. It changes things.

 

Here’s a story: One of my brothers used to live on the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean. He took tourists on sailboat snorkeling tours of the underwater national park there.

 

One day a tourist on his boat noted his last name and said something like, I had a teacher at Penn State with that last name. To which my brother replied, Small world. My sister used to teach at Penn State.

 

The tourist—a woman whose name to this day I do not know (my Penn State classes were 50 students each!)—then told my brother that my teaching had changed her life. She related to my brother a discussion I had conducted in class some 10+ years earlier.. in sufficient detail that I recognized the exact lesson she was talking about.

 

It had been a media criticism class and we had critiqued an example from an ad campaign that used controversial depictions of race to sell clothes.

 

And that discussion, the woman on my brother’s boat told him, changed forever how I perceive and understand race in our society.

 

That is the kind of outcome teachers live for! And I’m still teaching—and learning—about race, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about today. ….

 

God’s call and claim on our lives can change over time. Mine has. Yes, I still have a lot to say about race. But these days I am increasingly called to the fight to save our planet, to liberate God’s stupendous Creation from the neglect and abuse of its human caretakers.

 

How this call came about is a long and complex story. I don’t want to spend the last few minutes of this sermon telling it, so I’ll just mention a couple of things: Hurricane Katrina, a perfect storm that sent the entire state of Louisiana bouncing off the walls. My creative side that finds its expression in photography, a passion re-ignited by Katrina.

 

And even a phrase from our Book of Common Prayer… “these creatures of bread and wine.” That phrase changed my view of all of creation. Think about it! Or… in the pop lingo of today, “Let that sink in…” 

Passion flower (Passiflora incarnata), just one of the zillions of creatures at Camp Hardtner that can connect you with God.

So today, after our 10:15 service, I’ll jump in my car and head to Camp Hardtner, where I will spend a couple of hours teaching this summer’s camp counselors about the awesome biodiversity of that place and how they can not only enhance their own spiritual life by becoming caretakers of the earth, but also cultivate care for creation in their charges this summer.

 

This is what dancing in the eye of the hurricane looks like for me. I don’t know what dancing in the eye of the hurricane looks like for you, only that you too are called.

 

This multi-faceted One God is not some sort of benign, benevolent presence, sitting on a shelf waiting to receive our gratitude when things go right and hear our petitions when we need help. To be leaned on like a father and to pick us up and carry us when we’re tired like a brother.

 

However you imagine or understand the Triune God, whichever person of the Trinity you most gravitate towards, know this: The One God is already at work loving and reconciling this world. You, me, all of us are called to join in.

 

Whatever you are doing with your life, how are you making it an answer to God’s call and claim on you? That is the question we all must be able to answer.

 

This God, whose very Spirit we breathe, calls us and makes claims on our very life. And when we respond to that call, committing fully whatever gifts of time, talent and treasure we have... then we dance in the eye of the hurricane.

                                        

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN.