Update on Distancing & Mask Mandates

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

On Wednesday, the Diocese of Toronto sent an email to clergy and wardens that stated in part, “Although the Province of Ontario will be lifting mask mandates in most settings on March 21, churches in the Diocese are still asked to follow the Spring Guidelines for the time being. We will be re-evaluating our guidelines in light of the government’s decision and will communicate to you about them as soon as we’re able.” As of this writing, we have not received any further details.

The reference to the “Spring Guidelines” is to a document that, among other things, states that “Masks continue to be mandatory in our buildings.” Until further guidance is received from the Diocese, the consensus is to comply with the Diocese’s request in maintaining our mask mandate. This is unquestionably the case for Sunday, March 20, since the provincial mandate is still in effect until the next day. We are hoping that by next weekend, we will have greater clarity from the Diocese.

The most recent update from the Diocese confirms that social distancing is no longer mandatory and that households not related to each other may share pews if mutually agreeable. Before sitting in a pew occupied by others or directly in front of or behind an occupied pew, please check in with your nearest neighbour(s). For instance, asking, “Do you mind if I sit here, or would you prefer to maintain distance?” is a neutral way of posing the question that gives the person being asked the freedom to reply honestly and with a minimum of awkwardness. Some people will prefer to maintain distance, and this ought to be respected. The sidespeople can be of help in finding a place where you are most comfortable sitting, but ultimately we will all have to develop a new etiquette for ensuring that we are being as considerate of each other as is humanly possible.

I commend to you the pastoral words of Fr. Shire below.

Yours in Christ’s service,

N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector

 

Mask Mandates

Dear Friends in Christ,

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge for all of us. We have all experienced the difficulties, frustrations, and exhaustion of the lockdowns, social distancing, online school or work, travel restrictions, and, of course, masking. All of these have been used as tools in the effort to slow and halt the spread of the virus in society, and though we may have experienced varying levels of isolation due to these measures, we could take solace in the fact that in our commitment to each other, we were all in this together. We were doing all these things out of care for our neighbour, and such care is rooted in the Gospel message “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” To be sure, following the Gospel in this particular way has been and continues to be, to put it mildly, both tiring and trying, but our collective efforts did buy the world time to produce effective vaccines and pharmaceutical treatments for COVID-19. Though the future trajectory of the scourge of COVID-19 is unknown, we can say that we are in fact in a far better position now than we were two years ago. With God’s help, we did our best to demonstrate a spirit of cooperation, compassion, and care for one another, even if it was from two metres away or over a Zoom meeting.

And now we are entering into a new phase. With high vaccination rates and increasing access to COVID-19 treatments, public health measures have slowly been repealed in Ontario and across Canada. Capacity limits have been lifted, the vaccine passport system has been suspended, and beginning on March 21 the indoor mask mandate will be lifted for most places, except for those high-risk locations which will remain under a mandate until April 27 (which includes our own Friday Food Ministry).

Understandably, collectively we are approaching this March 21 date with mixed feelings. Some of us may be rejoicing that masks will be gone in most places; it is a sign to some that the pandemic really is over, and we can go back to our lives without constraint. Others among us are concerned that such a move may be premature, and there’s a sense that case numbers and hospitalizations need to be even lower than they currently are before lifting these measures. Some of us may work or live with people who are at higher risk for severe symptoms and outcomes from COVID-19. We may have loved ones who cannot be vaccinated due to their age. For many of us, masking continues to be a necessary precaution taken out of concern for the safety of others. And of course, a significant number of us in the St. Thomas’s community are ourselves immuno-compromised or at higher risk for severe symptoms and outcomes from COVID-19, and so we continue to use masking as a tool to keep ourselves as safe as possible under any given circumstances.

The truth of the matter is that we are all in different places and may have different attitudes about this new phase of the pandemic, and that is okay. But how do we navigate these uncertain waters? How do we balance our own feelings, needs, and wants with the feelings, needs, and wants of others?

From my perspective, though we may have experienced this pandemic in varying degrees of isolation, we did try to live at all times in a spirit of cooperation, compassion, and care. If we enter into this new phase with that same spirit of cooperation, compassion, and care that we have endeavoured, with God’s help, to show each other since March 2020, we will be better able to be gentle with each other and ourselves.

We are all in different places mentally, emotionally, and spiritually when it comes to the lifting of the mask mandate. We may feel anger and frustration if we see others unmasked while we are masked indoors. Alternatively, we may find ourselves angry and frustrated if we see others masked while we are unmasked indoors. Some of us will feel guilty for enjoying the loosening of restrictions; it may feel strangely transgressive. We will encounter these and a variety of other feelings in our own church building during our liturgies, and such feelings may be heightened when we see others acting differently from where we have landed.

As a community, though, we must, as Titus 3:2 puts it, “avoid quarrelling, be gentle, and show every courtesy to everyone.” We all have different levels of comfort and different ways of assessing risk, and we must respect and affirm this reality with humility and with that same spirit of cooperation, compassion, and care. Whether in person or away from each other, we are still one community and family, and, as such, mutual respect is key in how we think of and relate to each other as we enter into this new phase of the pandemic, even if we find ourselves in a different place from others in terms of our assessment of what constitutes acceptable risk. Wherever we land on that question, we are still all in this together, and whatever the future may hold, I am certain we will be able to face it as one community if we rely on the grace of God to give us the power to show God’s grace and love to one another.

 Fr. James Shire

Truthful Language, Meaningful Action

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

Massey College, University of Toronto

On Wednesday, I was given a tour of Massey College and taken to lunch in the dining hall by parishioner John Fraser, who was master of the college for nearly two decades, from 1995 to 2014. I felt at times as if I were being shown the storehouses of Hezekiah (cf. II Kings 20:13), though it would be more accurate to describe them as the secondary and tertiary reliquaries of Vincent Massey and Robertson Davies. My rhapsodic descriptions of these, however, will have to await a future Thurible letter (perhaps even next week’s, if you all behave yourselves). For now, I want to highlight what is, in my estimation, the jewel in the crown of that extraordinary place: the Chapel Royal, St. Catherine’s, with which the clergy of St. Thomas’s have had, as I understand it, a long association, given its proximity to us.

As one can read on the website linked to above: “On National Indigenous Peoples’ Day, June 21, 2017, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II bestowed a rare honour on St. Catherine’s Chapel at Massey College. She designated it a Chapel Royal in recognition of the sesquicentennial of Canada and the relationship between Massey College and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. In Anishinaabek, The Chapel Royal at Massey College is called Gi-Chi-Twaa Gimaa Kwe Mississauga Anishinaabek AName Amik (The Queen’s Anishinaabek Sacred Place), a name created by James Shawana, Anishinaabek language teacher at Lloyd S. King Elementary School in New Credit. With its new designation, the Chapel Royal will be used to acknowledge the history of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and its ratification through the 1764 Treaty of Niagara. The treaty, through its association with the Silver Covenant Chain of Friendship, represented a relationship of respect between Indigenous nations and the Crown in the Great Lakes Region.”

As a newcomer to Canada, I am learning as much as I can about the relationship between Canada, the Crown, and Indigenous Peoples. The word “acknowledgement” keeps coming up, and it is leading me to ask questions about what sort of acknowledgements are being made, and what these might mean.   

My journey down this road was kickstarted last Saturday after Mass. I greeted a number of Altar Guild members and other parishioners hard at work cleaning the church and setting up for the First Sunday in Lent. One of these busy bees was Marlene Fader, who informed me that she had intended at Vestry this year to follow up on a motion she made at Vestry last year. The minutes of that meeting record:

“16. OTHER BUSINESS Marlene Fader moved that we propose to Fr Humphrey that the Indigenous lands upon which the parish of St Thomas’s Church is situated be acknowledged in the weekly Sunday leaflet, or the pulpit. Seconded by Michael Rowland. Carried.”

Apparently, part of the thinking behind the particular wording of the resolution was that the new rector (that would be yours truly), once he settled in, would need to follow a process for determining whether and (if so) what sort of land acknowledgment would be most appropriate. (There’s no one-size-fits-all language, as I’ve since discovered.) According to Marlene, it was felt by some in the parish leadership that this matter ought to wait until I could be involved in its implementation.

I am sorry to admit that this matter had not come to my attention before Marlene pointed it out (I had only skimmed the prior year’s minutes in preparing for this year’s Vestry), and I am grateful to her. This unfinished business, as I see it, concerns what constitutes appropriate ways for St. Thomas’s to acknowledge the truth and to demonstrate our desire for reconciliation and our resolve to act accordingly.

When I was first appointed here, a friend from the States recommended I take an online course about Indigenous Peoples. I am sorry to admit that I never made the time to do so. (I didn’t, in fact, make the time to indulge in any online courses over the many months of transition.) So I have to admit that I am woefully undereducated on the purpose and meaning of land acknowledgements, beyond a very general awareness.

I am aware that members of the Huron-Sussex Residents Association, which recently held its annual meeting via Zoom, encouraged dialogue between a developer and representatives of the Indigenous community in this area. Our neighbours challenged the developer to think about ways that the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada might be implemented in the development of their site. I’m interested in learning more about that initiative, which came about because neighbours a few doors down the street cared enough to put words into action.

Just across Bloor Street, near the Spadina TTC station, is the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, which, according to its website, “has been a leader in the building of a healthy and vibrant urban Indigenous community in Toronto” for over fifty years. I’ve yet to visit. Clearly, I have my work cut out for me.

Since land acknowledgements involve questions about how we use words to express our desire for truth and reconciliation, and our solidarity with marginalized people, it can’t just pay “lip service.” Our Lord himself warns against such an attitude. As we find in Isaiah 29:13, “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” In Matthew 15:8, Jesus quotes this verse against the hypocritical Pharisees. Jesus reminds us that if we are to do anything with true moral integrity, either corporately or as individuals, we must move beyond mere words. Our words are important, but they need to be backed up by meaningful and constructive action.

When thinking through an issue, I try to research not just the views of its advocates but also its critics. Here’s one example from another debate about language: I recently read an opinion piece by John McWhorter in The New York Times, entitled “Capitalizing ‘Black’ Isn’t Wrong. But It Isn’t That Helpful, Either.” John McWhorter is a Black professor of linguistics at Columbia University, who made a bit of a splash this past year with his newest book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Since Prof. McWhorter is an anti-racist Black American who criticizes the language that some of his fellow anti-racist activists use, he is often asked why he’s in the habit of capitalizing the word “Black” in his opinion pieces for The New York Times. He replies, “The truth is: I’m not. The New York Times’s house style, on the news side and the Opinion side, requires it, and that’s how it reads when this newspaper publishes. But the copy that I send in has ‘black’ styled with an old-school lowercase ‘b.’” He goes on to explain that he doesn’t object to the style because he doesn’t think it actually matters. It doesn’t make any substantive difference in the fight against racism. It’s purely rhetorical.

Of course, rhetoric has a purpose, which is to signal our values, and to the extent that such things as capitalizing “Black” and inserting land acknowledgements do this effectively, they don’t do any apparent harm, and may do much good in creating positive, supportive, safe atmospheres for marginalized people. But conservative critics such as Prof. McWhorter are concerned about the chilling effect that so-called “woke” or “politically correct” language can have on open debate and discussion. It can harden people’s hearts by pushing people’s buttons.

Now, I personally do not think the word “woke” itself is very helpful. It is used in a pejorative sense to caricature people whose ideas about power and language some of us find threatening. Nevertheless, Prof. McWhorter (or his editor) decided to use that loaded word in his book’s title, likely because as a rhetorical signifier, it carries emotional freight that will help Prof. McWhorter sell many copies of his book!

Let me be clear that I’m not trying to stake out any defined position on the question of land acknowledgements. But I do think it’s important from the outset to ask ourselves why we might do something, what its intended consequences are, and what its unintended consequences might be. Things are never as simple as they seem. I would like to think that we all have our hearts in the right place and that we are always speaking and acting in good faith, but when it comes to sensitive topics, the temptation to dehumanize the other is strong indeed. So we have to start by questioning our assumptions and defining our intentions, or else we run the risk of not doing or saying anything actually worth doing or saying.

All this is to say that I am happy to commit myself to explore with Corporation how best to proceed, and sometime after Easter would very much like to engage the St. Thomas’s community—that is, as many of our people, neighbours, and friends who are interested in doing so—in listening to and learning from each other. But I am not interested in endless chatter and meaningless gestures. Perhaps the Social Justice Committee will want to facilitate such an engagement. But I suspect its members will first have to decide for themselves whether such an initiative aligns with the committee’s mission, which as I understand it is to stand in solidarity with the poor and to take meaningful action in the lives of individuals and communities that convert the hearts and minds not only of those whom we serve, but of everyone who is engaged in the work of social justice and reconciliation. I won’t presume to speak for members of Corporation or any committee. For now, I’ll just add this to the Advisory Board agenda. That seems like the best place to begin any formal process. My intent here is merely to raise the question publicly, as a way of beginning to address the intention behind the motion passed at last year’s Vestry.

In the meantime, my own education continues. A cursory internet search turned up the University of Toronto’s protocol regarding land acknowledgements. That seemed to me a good place to start, since we occupy the same native lands that the campus occupies. U of T undertook, as I expected it would, extensive “consultation with First Nations House and the Elders Circle, some scholars in the field, and senior University officials.” It developed its own acknowledgement, which you can read on its web page, and a specific policy: “The protocol for using the statement is: [The] Statement of Acknowledgement of Traditional Land [is] to be used at specific university ceremonies such as Convocation, Groundbreakings, and Building Openings…and is available to all members of the University community for use at University events as appropriate.”

The takeaway for me is that U of T recognizes that some language, if overused, loses its significance. It becomes lip service. In order for our language to accomplish what we hope it will, it needs to be used in the appropriate contexts, backed up by the appropriate actions.

One of the things I love about St. Thomas’s is that it is full of people who care about language. I am seeing this right now in our Lenten study on Psalms 51 and 22, “Let Scripture Speak,” which I am co-teaching with parishioner John Stuart on Wednesday evenings. And this has been true of the parish, perhaps since its founding. Some, like Katherine Barber, have already gone to their reward, while many others continue to reward us with their presence and intelligence.

When I read what the University of Toronto wrote about using its land acknowledgment at groundbreakings and building openings, it immediately resonated with me, as I hope that at some point in the not-too-distant future we will break ground on the proposed accessibility link now being discussed. The link will integrate several features that will enable it to serve as the cornerstone project for all other projects we undertake in my tenure, and quite possibly beyond. I can well imagine an appropriate land acknowledgement featuring in accessibility link’s groundbreaking ceremony, and, upon completion, at the consecration service. But if we are to do that, it must be truly meaningful. Consultation and cooperation with the local First Nations community would, I hope, be a part of that.

In thinking through these questions around truthful language, solidarity, meaningful action, and reconciliation, we do no one any favours by rushing to write something without thoroughly contemplating and communicating its meaning. I am grateful to Marlene for bringing this resolution to my attention, and I am committed to undertaking a process that will honour the intention that motivated it in the first place.

Yours in Christ’s service,

N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector

 

Puppy Love

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

Last Sunday after I officiated at Zoom Evensong, our family went to the home of a family in Rosedale. They were fostering a rescue dog who was picked up off the streets of a town in Mexico. And we adopted her. She is a three month-old puppy, whom Andrew named Coco. While Andrew did not name her intentionally in homage to the delightful Disney movie of the same name, which is set in Mexico and features a street dog, Anne and I immediately pointed out the suitability of the name. Whether, like the dog in the movie, she turns out to be a nagual, a spirit animal in disguise who can transform into an alebrije, remains to be seen. In any event, like that Disney dog, Coco has a wonderfully gentle disposition, and has already found a place in all our hearts.

Now, don’t get the wrong idea. Despite all appearances to the contrary, we aren’t really animal lovers. Even though we moved to Canada with two cats and a mouse, and now we have two cats and two mice, the addition of a dog to our household was not something Anne and I were particularly enthusiastic about doing. It was just that the cats are clearly bonded to the adults in the family, and the mice are without any doubt Margaret’s pets. The cats ignore Andrew, and Andrew’s access to the mice is entirely controlled by their Guardian-in-Chief. That left Andrew without a creature to call his own.

We had thought about getting him a turtle or a lizard or some fish, and I was very much in favour of procuring a hedgehog until Anne reported that they carry salmonella (who knew?), but none of these candidates would have matched our boy’s personality, nor given him what he needs, nor challenged him to grow in his sense of responsibility toward the animal world. Unfortunately for him, Andrew is an extrovert in a family of introverts. Even the cats and the mice are introverted. So, much as we hate to admit it, a puppy like Coco is, in fact, the perfect match for him.

Coco may be perfect for Andrew, but I was enjoying being a middle-aged father with increasingly independent children, so I was not in the mood for the attendant responsibilities and anxieties of puppy care. It’s like having a toddler again. I’ve been up at 1:30 and 3:30 in the morning to take Coco outside to do her business, so that she won’t have an accident in the middle of the night whilst cuddled up against Andrew in his bed. Thus, I must admit that it seemed to me no coincidence that this fate should befall me at the very beginning of Lent, for I find the burden of caring for another creature penitential in nature, and I had to fight against the resentment that this change brought about in my comfortable existence. I am, after all, as Anne likes to say, an “avid indoorsman,” so the thought of long walks in winter (or even only two minutes outside in the middle of the night) does not fill me with eager anticipation.

So, with apologies to all of you dog lovers out there, my Ash Wednesday sermon, which was on the topic of having “an appropriately miserable Lent,” was inspired by the fact that I am a selfish person at heart, which this puppy has brought home to me in an all-too-familiar way. Just as when I was a young father, and even now, being challenged to give more of myself than I want under circumstances not of my choosing brings on a certain kind of misery.

Admittedly, this misery is offset by the benefits of dog ownership, which I am just now beginning to appreciate. As I said to Anne the other day, “Our cats will never improve our social lives. But Coco already has.” Anne has been invited places because of Coco. People smile at us and assume (wrongly, in my case) that we are good people with open hearts.

Why am I so selfish? I am tempted to hide behind the fact that I’m merely human, and humanity is as a whole selfish. But this would be evasive of my own personal culpability. We’re all fallen, sinful human beings. (I write this as someone who is genuinely very fond of my fallen, sinful self.) But we must, especially in Lent, contend with whatever brand of besetting selfishness we tend to indulge in; and there are many brands from which to choose.

In my case, it appears that God, Anne, and Andrew have all conspired to send a puppy into my life to make it abundantly clear that when it comes to caring for others above myself, even though I’m a priest (for God’s sake!), I still very much stand in the need of God’s grace (and consequently, of your prayers).

I had an epiphany this past week, which is appropriate, I suppose, because last Tuesday was the end of Epiphanytide and Day Two (Night Three) of my “Hound of Heaven” penance. My epiphany began this way: I have always prided myself that, unlike the majority of my colleagues in ordained ministry (including, significantly, my own father), I am not burdened with the need to be needed. This has some distinct advantages when it comes to maintaining healthy boundaries, providing pastoral care that’s truly centred in the recipient and not covertly meeting my own needs, and an availability that is open but not intrusive. The down side is that sometimes I don’t want to be needed when I am. The epiphany itself came when I asked myself, “If I do not have the need to be needed, what do I have?” The answer came back, loud and clear: I have the want to be wanted.

The difference between someone who needs to be needed and someone who wants to be wanted is that the former is genuinely other-centred even when trying to meet her own needs, while the latter is essentially self-centred. People who need to be needed end up quite often in the caring professions: nursing, ministry, social work. People who want to be wanted often end up in professions where they are the centre of attention: actors and teachers, writers and preachers. We want to be admired for our wisdom or our skill, our capacity for understanding and giving voice to what it means to be human. We also want people to get something out of what we do, obviously, but we do it in large part because deep down inside, we simply want to be wanted.

In the final analysis, however, both the need to be needed and the want to be wanted are rooted in the same thing: the desire to be desired. To mix metaphors, both are simply two sides of the same coin. The desire to be desired is a perfectly healthy and human desire. It is the part of us that reaches out both in love and for love, the part of us that helps us realize that our hearts truly are restless until they rest in God. But the desire to be desired can also be twisted and corrupted. When our mythic ancestors saw that the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, was “a delight to the eyes, good for food, and to be desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3:6), they were turned from their desire for God to lesser goods. St. John refers to this when he writes that “all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh, and the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not from the Father but from the world” (I John 2:16).

And yet, the very desire that leads us astray, whether it manifests itself in needs or wants, can also put us back on the right path, with God’s help. And Lent is the season designed to remind us of this fact. As we read in Psalm 19:7-13,

The law of the Lord is an undefiled law, restoring the soul; /
the testimony of the Lord is sure, and giveth wisdom unto the simple.

The precepts of the Lord are right, and rejoice the heart; /
the commandment of the Lord is pure, and giveth light unto the eyes.

The fear of the Lord is clean, and endureth for ever; /
the judgements of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.

More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold; /
sweeter also than honey, and the honey-comb.

Moreover, by them is thy servant taught; /
and in keeping of them there is great reward.

Who can tell how oft he offendeth? /
O cleanse thou me from my secret faults.

Keep thy servant also from presumptuous sins, lest they get the dominion over me; /
so shall I be undefiled and innocent from the great offence.

“More to be desired are they than gold.” Lent reminds us that the Law of God, which Jesus taught us, can be summarized by the commandments to love God with all our hearts, and souls, and minds, and strength, and to love our neighbours as ourselves, reorients our hearts toward God and toward those who matter most to God: other people (and creatures, like puppies), whose needs and wants we can, with God’s help, gladly tend to, just as we can trust that our own deepest needs and wants will be supplied by the God who loves us—even more than any puppy has ever loved her guardians! That kind of puppy love is eternal.

Who can tell how oft he offendeth? /
O cleanse thou me from my secret faults.

Keep thy servant also from presumptuous sins, lest they get the dominion over me; /
so shall I be undefiled and innocent from the great offence.

Who knew that it would take a dog, of all things, to bring this epiphany home to me? Well, God knew, I guess. And I suspect Anne did, too.

The best thing about Coco is not that she convicts me of my want to be wanted, but that she helps meet the entirely wholesome and valid need that Andrew has to be needed. In this regard, finding myself caught short by the demands of love for Andrew’s sake is worth all the long winter walks Coco will ever require of me.  

Yours in Christ’s service,

N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector

 

Great Expectations

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

I recently read an article about the experience of parenting over these past two years, entitled “The Parents (Who Used to Come to Your Church) Are Not Okay,” by Lauren Graeber. She related how she was moved to tears when a pastor addressed parents on social media, writing, “You are not failing. You are being asked to do the impossible.”

Parents aren’t the only ones being asked to do the impossible, of course, but I wonder what St. Thomas’s can do to meet the needs of our families with children, very few of whom I have yet to meet in person.

Graeber suggests three things she as a parent would appreciate from her priest: 1) Being asked to come back. 2) Being asked about the parts of life that have been broken in the last two years. 3) Being asked what we need now.

If you’re a parent, is this what you need? I’m a parent, and I’m not sure it’s what I need. I certainly am hoping that our families will return as soon as possible. And if anyone is struggling with something broken, if you need someone safe to talk with about it, I kind of get paid to do that. And I hope the past few paragraphs have clearly expressed that I really would like to know what our families need.

 
 

I’d like to know what we all need, in fact. We are so blessed to have people from every stage of life in this community, and I want to know who you are and what you need. Because one of the most vexing things about these past several months has been how difficult it is to get to know other people, and to become known to others, when many of the normal ways that human beings are used to getting to know each other within a church community have been unavailable to us. And I’m not sure how long we can endure living without a robust parish life that nurtures our flourishing.

For aside from the aforementioned article’s focus on parents, Graeber named a state of being that many of us have found ourselves in, at least from time to time, and which may be a good description of how some of us feel right now: that we are languishing. Graeber links to a New York Times article by Adam Grant, who writes, “In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained and worthless.” He continues, “Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either.” Among other things, Grant notes, you know you’re languishing when you’re not functioning at full capacity, your motivation is dulled, and your ability to focus is disrupted.

Given this definition, is it any wonder that some of us are stuck in a state of languishing? Grant writes that many of us “have been struggling with interruptions from kids around the house, colleagues around the world, and bosses around the clock.”

In my own experience, I can be flourishing one day and languishing the next. So it’s not a fixed state by any means. Thankfully, there have been a lot of good things that have happened in my life and that of my family over the past two years. I feel like our family members are more gentle with each other than we may have been in the past, that we have learned how to cut each other a lot of slack, and that we now start from the assumption that we’re doing the best we can with what we have to work with in the moment. And chief among the good things that has happened to us is finding our way to St. Thomas’s, even though this parish is not yet flourishing due to the present circumstances. But we’re not exactly languishing, either, as the many reports for tomorrow’s Vestry meeting clearly indicate. We are more vibrant in some areas than others, of course, and as you can tell, I’m particularly worried most about those whom I haven’t had a chance yet to connect with on a truly meaningful level, which includes both parents with families and older parishioners.

At Vestry on Sunday afternoon, the title of my address will be “Great Expectations.” I think this expression aptly sums up both sides of the equation: The people, neighbours, and friends of St. Thomas’s have had great expectations of me, and I’ve had great expectations of you. Vestry will give us an opportunity to take stock of those expectations, and to recalibrate what we ought to expect of each other as we move forward together in 2022. I still have some pretty great expectations for you all, and I expect (and hope!) that you still have some pretty great expectations of me. The question we need to answer is: What does God expect of us, and can we meet God’s great expectations?

Yours in Christ’s service,

N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector

 

Reflections on Almsgiving

 

Photo: Billy Pasco on Upsplash

 

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

Nearly thirty years ago, the Presiding Bishop’s Fund for World Relief, now known as Episcopal Relief and Development, paid for me to attend their annual conference, which that year was being held in Seattle. The Fund had representatives from every state and each of the (at the time) eleven official Episcopal seminaries, and the purpose of the gathering was to learn more about the activities of the Fund both at home and abroad, so that the representatives could better communicate its mission and raise awareness. Seminarians were recruited not so much for our fundraising acumen as for the fact that we could be influencers on our peers and clergy networks, so that when the Fund representatives came knocking looking for donations, the clergy might be more receptive to allowing them access to congregations.

The executives of the Fund had no difficulty communicating the “World Relief” part of their mission. They spoke movingly of their role in the wake of natural disasters such as earthquakes in Haiti. But each annual conference was special because they also highlighted the domestic work of the Fund by putting us all on tour buses and taking us on a site visitation, where we would see the impact of the Fund’s support firsthand. The year before, we had gone to Kansas City and surveyed an area that had been devastated by flooding. Among other things, the floodwaters had been so powerful that they lifted caskets out of their graves and sent them floating down the street.

Our site visit to Seattle was not quite as dramatic. We were taken to the famous Pike’s Place Market, which was, as usual, filled with tourists. But in a small corner of the market there was a homeless shelter, whose executive director was a wheelchair-bound recovering alcoholic and drug addict who had lived on the streets for several years. The story of her journey from homelessness to stable housing and sobriety, and then from there to (of all things) the Episcopal priesthood and her current work with the homeless was inspiring. I remember that she was tough as nails and completely unsentimental about her pilgrimage of faith, which included time spent in prison. At the end of her spellbinding testimony, she said, “I want you to do me a favour.” I expected that a request for a donation or something was about to follow. But no. She said, “The next time a homeless person asks you for money, don’t give it to him. Every dollar I received enabled me to live on the streets for one more day, whether I bought food or drugs or whatever. Every act of charity prevented me from hitting bottom. And it was only when I hit bottom that I realized that the help I was getting from good people like you wasn’t helping me at all. So if you want to help homeless men and women, don’t give them money.”

I was shocked. After all, in Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus says, “Give to everyone who begs from you…Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Wasn’t this priest contradicting Jesus’ own teaching?

But she continued, “Give them something more valuable. Give them a relationship.” She went on to describe how only when people stopped to engage her as another human being and tried, even unsuccessfully, to connect her to community services that were equipped to address the root causes of her homelessness, did she begin to see a way out of her desperate situation. Only when other people honoured her dignity, even after she finally “hit bottom,” and stood in solidarity with her did she receive the help she really needed.

I’ve thought a lot about that priest’s words since then. And I’ve come to the conclusion that almsgiving, traditionally understood, is not a bad thing. But when Jesus says, “Give to everyone who asks of you” and “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” I think that second part indicates that any almsgiving we engage in (whether directly to a person in need or to a program or charity set up to address their needs, such as the Friday Food Ministry) is only the beginning of what it means to live by the Golden Rule.

I will be the first one to admit that I do not engage every poor or homeless person who puts out their hand to me. I am often in a hurry and do not wish to stop. And of course, walking the streets of a major city in a clerical collar presents its own set of challenges. Some people think that I’m an easy mark. Others don’t even engage me, likely because they’ve had negative experiences with clergy in the past. But when I’ve been intentional about my almsgiving, I will stop and give the person my card, or ask them whether they know of the Friday Food Ministry. I will try to honour their dignity as fellow human beings created in the image of God, and occasionally I manage to do something that demonstrates not simply my goodwill, but my solidarity.

If, in this upcoming season of Lent, you wish to be more intentional about your own almsgiving, ask yourself what might add some extra value to the Loonie or Toonie you give, whether to someone who asks you directly, or to the ministry or agency whose mission is to address the symptoms and causes of any given social ill. Volunteering can be almsgiving. Of course, many of us already volunteer. If we are working in any form of outreach, perhaps seeing it as part of your almsgiving may add an extra layer of meaning to your commitments.

There are many ways that we choose to give alms. And if you’re anything like me, your almsgiving is less consistent than you’d like it to be. Self-flagellation, however, is not one of the three traditional disciplines of Lent. In prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, we are seeking to extend our relationship with God and with each other in new or deeper ways. Even when we do not live up to the high standards we might like to keep, the intention to see the image of God in our neighbour, whomever that neighbour might be, does in fact please God. God can take whatever alms you have to give and multiply them, more than either the giver or the receiver can imagine, if both giver and receiver are willing to cooperate with God’s abundant and redeeming grace.

Yours in Christ’s service,

N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector

 

Fasting: More Than One Way to Do It

 
 

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

“Everyone has issues with food,” a fellow priest once asserted in conversation. My immediate internal reaction was, “Well, I don’t!”

That was decades ago. In retrospect, I was not so much in denial as I was lacking in self-awareness. Back then, I thought that because I didn’t have a “weight problem,” I didn’t have any “issues” with food. But I know myself a bit better now. Recently, while reflecting on the discipline of fasting, I was reminded of the summer I turned twenty-three.

I spent the summer of 1993 between semesters at Yale Divinity School undertaking intensive independent research for several hours each day. Since I wanted to make the most of the hours that the library was open, and because the work that I was doing was so absorbing, I found myself ignoring my stomach when it began to signal that I was hungry. I worked without a break despite the guttural growling that could have been heard by the librarians themselves. It was only when I got a headache I could not ignore that I would reluctantly set aside my work, dash out for some quick junk food, wait for the headache to clear as my blood sugar returned to normal, and then go back to work as soon as possible, bent over those precious books until the librarians told me (firmly but kindly) to leave.

Prior to that, headaches were an infrequent experience. But ever since then, I have had regular migraines and cluster headaches, even when I’m doing everything right: sleeping well, eating well, managing my stress, et cetera. Perhaps it is my body’s revenge for neglecting it when all it wanted was a little regular maintenance.

Ignoring my body until I hurt myself was not fasting. It brought no spiritual benefit; in fact, it led to lasting physical detriment. My brain may have been feasting on my research topic, but my brain was also starving, and this doubtless affected my mood and cognitive functioning in other ways, as well. I let my brain chemistry and my body chemistry go haywire that summer, and although the research I produced was brilliant, the way I treated my body was just about the stupidest thing I could have done to it.

Despite this experience, I still don’t like to make my own meals. And, left to my own devices, I always default to the fastest, cheapest food available. (I have a special affinity for hotdogs and fries from a particular roadside stand in Maryland.) Thankfully, I am married to a woman who is mindful about eating healthy meals and doing so with reliable consistency. I am truly spoiled, in that I hardly ever have to prepare my own meals, or anyone else’s, for that matter. Of course, I feel appropriately guilty about this, but not guilty enough to amend my ways. Maybe one day.

In Life in Christ: Practicing Christian Spirituality, Julia Gatta begins her reflection on fasting by observing that there’s not just one way to do it. “Fasting” does not necessarily mean abstaining from all food and drink, and the importance of fasting in the Christian tradition does not depend upon how rigorously one observes this discipline. As she writes, “Just how we practice [fasting] will depend upon our work and state of health, as we weigh the spiritual benefits of a more or less rigorous fast.”f

Fasting—and by this I mean not just from food, but from whatever—at its best, done prayerfully, willingly, and with intention, trains the will. It is a form of praying with the body and the mind and the heart. Fasting (ideally) increases our compassion. Fasting reminds us how dependent we are on the natural order, on other people, and on God for our well-being. Fasting challenges our attitudes toward food (or toward whatever we feel called to fast from, such as technology). Fasting shakes our notion of what is “enough” for us, what exactly constitutes “our daily bread.” As Gatta puts it, “We sense in our very bodies utter dependence upon God, the giver of all good gifts, and we realize anew our overwhelming need for grace to uphold us in our frailty.”

I’m not sure that there’s anyone alive who has not at some point or other felt alienated from their own body. We spend a lot of time wishing our body (or at least parts of it) looked different than it does; we mourn the ravages of time. We know that sometime in the future, if we live long enough, our bodies will be less functional than they are now. It’s all downhill from here.

In short, our bodies are passing away. A cheery thought, no? Yet, as Julia Gatta writes, “St. Paul teaches that the body bears immense dignity because of our union with Christ in the resurrection.…He further reminds us: ‘Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body’ (1 Cor. 6:20). If we are to ‘glorify God in the body,’ what would that look like?”

Reflecting on that question, I am moved to ask: What would it take for me to see my body the way God sees it? And the answer that comes immediately to mind is, “I need to love the body I have, not the body I want to have, or used to have.” And part of being embodied is learning how to be present in the here and now with oneself and those around us. Only when we love what—and who—God has given us in the present moment can we give that body and our relationships with other embodied creatures over to God’s service with joy and thanksgiving.

Even so, I know what I should do. Eat right. Exercise regularly. Maintain hygienic habits. Worship. Offer thanks. Spend less time on my dang iPhone. In this respect, fasting is not only about food, but about relationships in general. After all, we are all too often gluttons for other things: media consumption, shopping, and any habit or addiction. Fasting reminds us that even good things, if indulged in without moderation or approached without appropriate caution, can take us down a path whose destination is not new life, but death.

So fasting, from food or anything else, when undertaken in the right spirit and under the right conditions, is a part of the very long list of things I “should” do. But every “should” needs some incentive. We have to desire to engage in the practices that lead to physical and spiritual health, not simply know that we should desire them. What will spark the desire for the right things?

The age-old answer has been, is now, and ever will be: the grace of God. We fast so that we can learn (or remember anew) how to hunger and thirst after righteousness. And righteousness is grounded in right relationships, not only to things like food and our electronic devices, but our relationships with our friends and neighbours, our families and the strangers whom we meet. Most importantly of all, seeking a right relationship with God impels us to fast from anything that distracts us from the source of all good, and the only true joy that is eternal. As Julia Gatta writes, “Lent, then, can initiate a recovery of balance that leads to Easter joy. It could begin the hard process of undoing injurious habits that would continue the rest of the year.” As we approach Lent, let us consider what fast(s) we may be called to undertake, so that we can hunger and thirst, above all else, for union with God and each other in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Yours in Christ’s service,

N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector

 

The Upcoming “Gesimas”: Getting Ready for Getting Ready

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

Candlemas was this past week, and this year the second of February fell on a Wednesday. Looking at a calendar, that means that precisely four Wednesdays from Candlemas (since February has only twenty-eight days), we will be observing Ash Wednesday. In other words: Lent is coming!

This Sunday is the final Sunday before the “Gesimas,” the three Sundays that help us start the official countdown to Lent. These Sundays are often referred to as “Pre-Lent.” It is a getting ready for getting ready.

But to what purpose are we expected to ready ourselves? The upcoming Gesimas give us an opportunity to be intentional about what we might do to observe a holy Lent.

I’m used to hearing people talk about what they’re “giving up for Lent,” be that meat, or chocolate, or alcohol, or some other treat. But why “give up” anything at all? And is giving up something for Lent simply like making some sort of New Year’s Resolution, but one that (thankfully) has an Easter Vigil expiration date?

In Life in Christ, Julia Gatta writes of the three traditional disciplines of Lent: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Lent is about a lot more than simply giving up something for a few weeks. When it comes to prayer, it may mean taking something on. In the context of the most recent chapter we discussed on Thursday, “Sanctifying Time through the Liturgical Round,” the best candidate for taking on would be a renewed commitment to some form of daily prayer.

Over the next week or two, as we get into the Gesimas themselves, I will reflect on the traditional disciplines of fasting and almsgiving, but this letter will focus on prayer ….

Sometimes, heavy-duty topics are best addressed in simpler terms, and as I thought about what prayer, at its best, does, I was reminded of a passage from one of my favourite children’s books, The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. For it occurred to me that there are many things prayer “does,” but all of them really have to do with something the little prince learns in the twenty-first chapter of this charming little book.

The two main characters, as you may recall, are a fox and a prince. At the end of Chapter 20, the little prince “lay down in the grass and cried” because he was alone. Chapter 21’s first line is “It was then that the fox appeared.” Although perhaps not intended as a religious allegory in quite the way that C.S. Lewis intended Aslan as a stand-in for Jesus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, let us nevertheless imagine that you, dear reader, are the prince (or princess, or any rank lower than Her Majesty the Queen, for that matter), and that the fox is a stand-in for a particular desire, namely, the desire for God, which simultaneously manifests itself as God’s desire for you in Christ Jesus. The story continues with the prince (that is, with you) in a moment of loneliness and unhappiness, saying: “Come and play with me. I am so unhappy.”

“I cannot play with you,” the fox said. “I am not tamed.”

“Ah! Please excuse me,” said the little prince. But, after some thought, he added: “What does that mean—‘tame’?”…

“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. “It means to establish ties.”

“‘To establish ties’?”

“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others.”

That is, just as Julia Gatta expresses that human beings are “a bundle of desires,” the desire for God isn’t automatically the highest or most acute desire we will feel in any given moment. In fact, such a desire is often jumbled up inside of us, mixed up with a hundred thousand other desires that we mistake for God, or that we attach to as a (poor) substitute for God. And at this point in the story, you must understand that God is playing “hard to get,” not because God does not simultaneously desire union with us, but because God knows this union simply isn’t possible without a reciprocal desire on our part, which must be expressed in an intention to establish ties with God, through prayer. With that aside, let us return to the dialogue:

The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time. “Please—tame me!” he said.

“I want to, very much,” the little prince replied. “But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.”  

“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me…”  

“What must I do, to tame you?” asked the little prince.

“You must be very patient,” replied the fox. “First you will sit down at a little distance from me—like that—in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day…”

The next day the little prince came back. “It would have been better to come back at the same hour,” said the fox. “If, for example, you came at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o’clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you…One must observe the proper rites…”

“What is a rite?” asked the little prince.

“Those also are actions too often neglected,” said the fox. “They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours.”

…So the little prince tamed the fox.

Or rather, as the astute reader will observe, the fox tames the little prince.

This little chapter from a children’s book perfectly sums up, in an allegorical way, why we are invited to observe rites such as the Daily Office, with Morning Prayer at 8:30 am (9:30 on Saturdays) and Evening Prayer at 5 pm (4 pm on Sundays). We find that by coming back on a regular basis to expressing our desire for God in a way that exhibits even the smallest intention to connect with God, God is more likely to tame us than if we approach our prayers without any fixed purpose or intention.

Above: Click the left and right arrows to scroll through three images of the little prince and the fox, hand-coloured by Fr. Humphrey in 1991.

Of course, the Daily Office isn’t the only way to do this. As the fox himself notes, “Words are the source of misunderstandings,” which is why contemplative prayer, such as the group that Fr. Brian Bartley leads, can be even more effective in making that connection. I am, as you may have noticed, a wordier and more distractable fellow than Fr. Bartley, so I need the crutch of the psalms, canticles, scripture readings, and prayers to lead me to a place of availability to God. And even when I don’t understand the words, or am disturbed by them (as we discussed on Thursday in the Life in Christ book study), just sitting with them, in perplexity and doubt, but with the desire to know God, is enough. Or at least it’s enough of a beginning.

And so as we approach the Gesimas, I invite you to consider what prayer discipline(s) you might take on – or renew – that have the potential to establish ties with God (and through God, with each other), what rites you might observe, whether corporately or alone, with a book or via Zoom, and how that might begin anew a lifelong process of allowing God to tame you. If it’s Morning Prayer, it’s only fifteen minutes or so a day. Yet it could make all the difference in the world.

Yours in Christ’s service,

N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector

 

Source: Cultural Services, French Embassy in the United States: https://frenchculture.org/events/11901-le-petit-prince-little-prince

A Mouse That Taught Us So Much about Love

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

I woke up on Friday morning intending to write a meditation on the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, since this Sunday I plan to preach on 1 Corinthians 12–31a, that famous passage wherein St. Paul writes, “just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” But as soon as I had made the bed, Anne came down from the children’s floor to inform me that she had found our daughter’s beloved pet mouse, Brownie, dead. It’s a terrible thing when a parent must wake up her child first thing on a Friday and convey such sad news.

Brownie was a confirmation gift. The usual gift, of course, is a Book of Common Prayer, but Margaret wanted to adopt a brown mouse that she had seen at the pet store the day before, when we had gone shopping for cat food. During the car ride home, I tried to put her off by speculating that we might have some difficulty getting a pet mouse into Canada, but before we had gotten home, she’d already pulled out her iPad and looked up the official regulations on the Government of Canada’s website and informed me that I was quite wrong.

She undertook further research on caring for mice and presented her case most emphatically. Anne suspected that she, not Margaret, would be the one who ended up taking care of this unwanted and unwelcome mouse, but nevertheless, on the afternoon of May 30, 2021, the Day of Pentecost, following the laying on of the Bishop’s hands that morning, we adopted a mouse to celebrate Margaret’s confirmation.

Despite what one might think, Brownie was not named in honour of his colour, or after the delicious baked good of the same name. He was in fact named after a type of fairy known as the Brownie. At bedtime, Anne had recently read aloud to us an entertaining story from 1884, entitled The Adventures of a Brownie by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, about this spritely creature, and it had clearly captured Margaret’s imagination.

Brownie the Mouse quickly captured our hearts. We did not expect to fall in love with a mouse. When I was in grade eight, I had kept three colonies of mice as a genetics experiment for science class, and I still had my journal from my adventures in mouse breeding. Back then, I was fond of my (many) mice, and certainly had my favourites, but I wasn’t particularly emotionally attached to any of them. For her part, Anne had no goodwill towards them at all. Nevertheless, because Margaret was concerned that Brownie would get lonely while she was at school, Anne began to allow Brownie to roll around in his orange ball in her home office, and she soon grew fond of his companionability. Not only that, but Margaret showed a surprisingly conscientious dedication to his care and feeding. She also began to train him to do tricks, using small lengths of uncooked spaghetti as treats.

Soon, Margaret could stroke Brownie’s cheek until he looked dreamy and leaned against her hand and put the thumb of his little paw in his mouth. Have you ever seen a mouse suck its thumb? If such a sight did not melt your heart, I would begin to doubt your humanity. As soon as Margaret stopped stroking his cheek, he would spring into action again, running, playing, and sniffing at everything and everyone. Margaret was a veritable Mouse Whisperer.

When Bp. Jenny Andison and her husband, Tim, came to dinner with their youngest daughter in mid-October, Brownie turned out to be the life of the party, delighting the Bishop by licking honey off her finger. (It was even revealed that the Bishop had been the proud keeper of a pet mouse when she was a child.)

Brownie was only with us for just under eight months. But in so short a time, who knew that a little mouse could teach a family so much about love? And yet, that’s what companion animals do, for families and for individuals. Theologians and Biblical scholars have debated the place of animals in the spiritual realm. Do animals have souls? Do all dogs go to heaven? For my part, I have no well-developed theology other than what I would say to my students back when I was a school chaplain. A girl from the nursery school once asked me what happened to her cat after the cat died, and I simply replied that all life comes from God, and all life returns to God. In the meantime, it is up to us to love the lives that God entrusts to us.

Of course, loving always entails loss. Love is not simply a risky bet, it is a losing one, because the odds are 100 per cent in favour of death. Every person and creature we love will die (as will we), and sometimes our love dies even before the other being dies, or their love for us. But we still choose to love. Is it because we cannot help it? Is it because we are fools? Or is it because life and love and loss are inseparably intertwined?

Our children’s grief was so raw that we felt they needed to stay home from school that day. (Thankfully, it was the last day of the school semester for Margaret, and all that the teachers and students were planning was to watch movies as a reward.) Margaret decided that Brownie could never be replaced. But she needed a connection to nature in this urban jungle, and Brownie was that connection for her. Later that day, having decided she wanted to risk loving again, Margaret went online and found a pet store about an hour away that had female mice available for adoption. So even though we warned her that she might find herself in a vale of tears again eight months from now, and if not eight months, then certainly one day, likely within the next two years, she decided that she wanted to adopt again. So we made a three-hour round trip to Milton and back (I had called all the Toronto stores but they only had males), to pick up two very dainty mice whom Margaret named Cinnamon and Pepper. One is blonde and a bit fluffy, and the other is sleek and has markings like a brown-and-white cow. After we brought them home, Anne said that she wasn’t sure she personally could go through this sort of thing every eight months. These past two years have brought so much loss of human life, so why should we add more gratuitous opportunities for grief?

Anne and I once heard an interview in which a woman described the experience of parenthood as giving birth to a part of one’s heart that then went out into the world without her control or protection. We give parts of ourselves away to those we love, despite the knowledge that in the end we will all come to grief. But Christian hope gives us an assurance that all life comes from God and all life returns to God, and that in the end, it is love, not death, that has the final say. And so we live in hope, and when it comes to remembering those whom we have loved but see no more, we pray that God will give us the grace to find at the end of grief a sense of thanksgiving for the lives from God that have touched our lives, whether mediated through another human being or through an animal. And in that thanksgiving, we indeed find that loving, even in the midst of loss, is always worth it in the end.

Yours in Christ’s service,

N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector

 

Oppressive Languor vs. Liberating Freneticism

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

This Sunday, January 16, 2022 will mark exactly six months since my family and I arrived in Canada. Because we are living through such a strange stretch of world history, I feel like I have been existing in a sort of time warp that alternates randomly between frenetic and languorous, each state characterized by some measure of either the oppressive or the liberating. If I were to try to map my state of mind and body in an average week (or even an average day), it would look something like this:

Wherever I am at the moment, I often find myself torn between seemingly opposing desires: the desire to rest and the desire to be productive; the desire to be creative and the desire for structure. This is as true of my home life as it is of my work life, because I’m the same person wherever I am and whatever I’m doing. I’m as flawed and as gifted at home as I am at work, though each sphere gives me different opportunities to display my weaknesses and my strengths.

Even were we in “normal” times, I suppose this all would still be the case, but for the past two years, it seems like every desire I have feels so much more intense (or numbing), the stakes so much higher (or irrelevant), when we are suffering and hoping, working and waiting for a better tomorrow.

This theme of desires came up in my reading recently. The context is that over the next four Thursdays, Fr. D’Angelo and I will be facilitating a noonday discussion group on Julia Gatta’s Life in Christ: Practicing Christian Spirituality. (See details here.) The author is the professor of pastoral theology at the School of Theology at Sewanee, a seminary of the Episcopal Church. While I already had the book in one of the many, many boxes of books we lugged off the moving van six months ago, it was Fr. D’Angelo who suggested it might be a good way to examine the content and practice of the Christian faith in a distinctly Anglican mode. Our conversations will be geared towards those who are considering baptism or confirmation as adults and those who want an introduction (or refresher) to Anglican spirituality and Christian discipleship. Do join us if you can.

In the introduction to Life in Christ, entitled “The Heart’s Longing,” Professor Gatta writes of “the ache of the human heart for something transcendent.” Like many spiritual writers before her, she claims that “God has instilled this infinite desire in us precisely so it might lead us back to Infinite Love.” It is “God’s desire for us that animates our desire for God.” Her stated purpose for the rest of the book is to describe the ways that Christians, particularly “in churches of a catholic character, including the Episcopal and Anglican tradition,” attempt to respond to this desire, to “drill down to the source of these desires, attempting to name and embrace it.”

Prof. Gatta goes so far as to claim that “all our true needs and desires fall under the scope of God’s care. When our desire for God is acknowledged, when we boldly pray…for the reality of God to take hold and move us into the vast abyss of divine love, these other legitimate but subordinate desires gradually fall into place.”

I might even go further and say that all our needs and desires, whether they are “true” or “artificial” (as, for instance, the desires that consumer culture attempts to inculcate in us) are under the scope of God’s care, for it is only when we submit every desire to God that we are given the grace to see them for what they really are, and equipped by God to order them or dispose of them as God might will us to do. That is to say, even our most sinful, shameful, hurtful, and wretched desires, when dragged kicking and screaming into the light of Christ, lose their power over us, and can even be redeemed, given back to us in a transformed way that enlarges and softens our hearts towards each other. God takes away the shrunken and sclerotic desires of our hearts of stone and gives us revivified hearts of flesh.

Does this sound hopelessly idealistic or unbearably romantic to you? Perhaps a classic example from Scripture will demonstrate my point. In Genesis chapter three, we are told that when Eve looked at the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate…” Notice those three specific things that motivated Eve: she is tempted by the fruit because it “was good for food,” “a delight to the eyes,” and “to be desired to make one wise.”

We find a sort of commentary on these three categories of temptation in the First Epistle of John: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desires are passing away, but those who do the will of God live forever.”

The “desires of the flesh” corresponds to Eve’s seeing the fruit as “good for food.” “The desires of the eyes” corresponds to Eve’s seeing the fruit as “a delight to the eyes.” And what I translate here as “the boastful pride of life” can be correlated to the fact that the fruit was “desired to make one wise,” that is, Eve desired it because she believed it would confer power, so that she could rely on her own strength and abilities apart from God. In short, that fruit represents every desire known to humanity, and the potential that any of our desires has to be used, not as a way to deepen our desire for God and experience God’s desire for us, but to make idols of people, things, and powers we mistakenly think can give us our heart’s desire better than God! We idolize other people (or ourselves) by relying on them (or ourselves) to bring us a sense of contentment and fulfillment. We look to things—anything at all—to give us a sense of purpose and meaning. We worship power, and fame, and wealth (either our own or others’) to make us happy or at least to keep us entertained, distracted, or occupied, and we find that nothing fills the God-shaped hole in our hearts. As St. Augustine of Hippo famously wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

But there is an alternative. When we pay attention to our desires, whether they are noble or base, and if we offer them up on the altar of the true and living God, we find that God works through those desires—all of them—to turn us from the worship of idols and toward a relationship with God in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. This relationship leads to true life now, and in the age to come, life everlasting. This claim is neither romantic nor idealistic. The process of sacrificing our desires on the altar of the cross so that they might be redeemed to God’s glory and our sanctification takes a lifetime. We have to dedicate “our selves, our souls and bodies”—in all their splendour and wretchedness—again and again.

Some days we approach this life of Christian discipleship with oppressive languor, at other times in a rush of liberating freneticism. Most of the time, we’re somewhere in between, and occasionally we feel like we are living a quotidian existence that is directionless and disorienting. How then shall we live? We find the answer to that question in prayer. The sort of prayer I have in mind may be described as laying every desire bare at the feet of Jesus, and begging the Father to send the Holy Spirit to transform our desires so that they lead us back to their purest and highest Source, where we may abide in the Presence of the God of Love, who gives us life in Christ.

Yours in Christ’s service,

N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector

 

Closing of Sundays to In-Person Worship →

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

Every week I sit down and try to write something worth your time to read. Connecting with each other has been so difficult over the past two years, and as a newcomer I’ve been grateful for the various ways we have been able to connect nonetheless, whether in person in the limited fashion that’s been available to us up until now, or via other media, be it livestreamed services, or Zoom, or this weekly email.

I had been hoping that by now the situation would be brighter than it has turned out to be. We are on the brink of what I hope will be a relatively brief closing of our Sundays to in-person worship beginning next Sunday the 16th, which as it so happens will mark six months to the day that my family and I arrived in Canada. I was looking forward to celebrating that minor milestone with those of you who could join us in person, but now I know that only those with defined roles in the Sunday liturgies are authorized by the Bishops to attend our services. (I am profoundly grateful for the consolation and blessing of our dedicated altar servers, musicians, and staff members who will make this possible.) Nevertheless, the lack of a congregation grieves my heart, and there’s no dissembling it. This new year has been on the whole a disappointment to me thus far, despite the bright spots (my daughter’s fifteenth birthday on the Epiphany being one of them). I can put on a brave face and declare that “There’s nowhere to go but up!” But there’s no guarantee of that, so why make any claims that could prove false?

In the midst of my grief and desolation, I wonder what I can do for you that will compensate for this latest loss to our common life. One thing I can think of is that we are going to do our best to prepare St. Thomas’s for your return, and in the meantime, improve the quality of our livestreaming as much as possible.

The good news is that sometime in 2022, we should have a brand-new sound and livestreaming system installed in the church, followed not long thereafter, I hope, by an upgraded lighting system. And of course, we have other accessibility projects in the works as well, which we look forward to presenting to you for your feedback, refinement, and approval. So wherever you may be now or in the future, we are doing our best to make St. Thomas’s both your home and your home away from home in 2022. And when you cannot be with us in person, I hope that St. Thomas’s will be your home at home (or elsewhere) via livestreaming, this email newsletter, and our website.

There’s no substitute for being together, of course, which is why we are doing everything we can to ensure that when the day comes at last when we can be together fully present to each other in the beauty of holiness, our fellowship will be supported by this place we love so dearly. In this regard, I feel like someone preparing my house for a big party, and this gives me something to look forward to; after all, I always look forward to seeing you.

It is a peculiar feeling to miss people, many of whom one hasn’t even yet met in person. But I do. I miss you, and even when you are here, I miss seeing your (entire) faces. This current way of doing things, necessary as it apparently is, leaves much to be desired. But the desire itself, even if unfulfilled, is good to have. It makes me look forward all the more to a brighter day. And the days will get brighter, somehow, won’t they? I keep waiting for us to reach the tipping point, when a life freely lived and a present gladly and unconditionally embraced is again possible. I sense it lurking around the corner. I just don’t know how long, and I’d like to stop counting the days, but I’m not a very patient person, and time is short, and I long for us to be together.

And so I sign off this ersatz love letter with genuine assurances of my affection and devotion, looking for that blessed day when we at last can live the way we want to live, in faith, hope, and love. In the meantime, perhaps we will learn through this pestilential time how to live lives of genuine love and service despite it all. I know this is possible. In fact, it’s necessary. It’s just more pleasant to do when you’re around.

Yours in Christ’s service,

N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector

 

Copy of Special Q&A Bulletin from the Diocese

Circulated to Clergy, Churchwardens and Staff on January 6

Here are answers to some questions about the modified Red Stage Guidelines announced yesterday. If you have a question about your church or ministry during the pandemic, send it to info@toronto.anglican.ca and the staff at the Diocesan Centre will do our best to answer it.

Q: Do the modified Red Stage Guidelines require us to have only one singer like last time?

A: There are no numerical limits on liturgical leadership for live streaming or pre-recording, and that includes musicians. As long as everyone present is vaccinated, distanced and masked, with distinct leadership roles, you may include multiple musicians, even a small choir.

Q: Do we need to shut down immediately? We had already accepted registrations for this Sunday’s in-person service, and we don’t have volunteers ready to live stream.

A: If it’s too difficult to cancel this Sunday’s plans for worship, proceed carefully and safely with your in-person service, and then shut down on Monday. The entire Diocese must adhere to the new Red Stage Guidelines by Monday, Jan. 10.

Q: We don’t have the ability to offer our own online services. Can we simply direct people to another parish that is online?

A: Yes, please share with your parishioners all the ways they can worship online, including tuning into the St. James Cathedral live stream on the diocesan YouTube channel.

Q: Can the bishops give us more than one day’s notice (Jan. 31) for February’s plans? I need more time than that to plan.

A: The College of Bishops will be monitoring the situation closely over the next three weeks and tracking trends not only in the actual infection and hospitalization rates, but also in how the wider Church and the rest of society (e.g., schools) are responding. If it becomes clear earlier than Jan. 31 how things should unfold in February, the Bishop’s Office will publicize its decision-making as soon as possible.

Q. Does the closure of churches preclude us from offering our space for pop-up vaccine clinics?

A. Allowing the public to gather in our buildings for pop-up vaccination clinics managed and authorized by regional health authorities is an appropriate and faithful exception to our own policy of closure.

Q. How do the new Red Stage Guidelines affect outside groups using our buildings?

A. Parishes should continue to meet the obligations of their lease and license agreements, on the condition that licensees are adhering to the provincial guidelines and public health requirements that apply to them, including masking and distancing. As before, they must comply with our vaccination policy, do screening and contact tracing, only use the building and spaces as clearly stated in their agreement, and be aware of responsibilities like regular cleaning.

Q: Our vestry meeting is scheduled for Jan. 30, and we were planning to do it in person. Does this mean that we need to move to a virtual format?

A: Under the modified Red Stage Guidelines and provincial regulations, small indoor gatherings of up to five people can occur with masking and strict physical distancing. Since vestry meetings would exceed the five-person limit, these meetings must be held virtually as long as we remain under the Red Stage Guidelines. Last year’s vestry guidelines are still available on the COVID-19 Updates page. You can also see this page if you’re looking for resources to help you provide online meetings.

Proceeding as Planned but with Provisos

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

Since the Bishop has left Christmas observances to the discretion of the clergy in charge of each parish, after consultation with the staff and wardens, I have decided to proceed with our planned in-person services, including choral music and limited congregational singing, but with the specific provisos outlined below. If you choose to attend one of our services, we expect that your presence with us will entail your full cooperation, whether these provisos are to your liking or not. These provisos are certainly not to my liking in the sense that I wish they were unnecessary, but recent events indicate otherwise.
 
Provisos for In-Person Attendance

  1. Masking: At all times, everyone in the church must wear an N95, KN95, or an acceptable equivalent mask. If you do not have one of these qualifying masks, the minimum acceptable coverage is two disposable medical face masks properly fitted, and for choristers with properly fitted singing masks, one disposable medical face mask worn over that. Given recent research, cloth masks on their own, unless worn with two disposable masks, provide insufficient protection. If you do not have an acceptable mask, two disposable masks will be issued to you at the door. A reminder that masks should be worn covering both one’s nose and mouth at all times.

  2. Congregational singing is still allowed, but we strongly recommend that you do so softly, if at all. Tuneful humming, such as when we are enjoying a piece of music on the radio, is fine; we want you to enjoy the music and to participate in it, but with this new variant that is several times more contagious than others, we can’t encourage anything more than gentle singing behind your mask(s).

The gang from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special demonstrates the dos and don’ts of congregational vocalizations. In the minute-long clip below, if you imagine the gang wearing masks (and standing appropriately spaced apart), what they do from 0:16 through 0:44 (including their contented silence) is lovely. But we are duty-bound to discourage the sort of behaviour they exhibit when they get more boisterous, starting at 0:45, and especially their full-throated singing beginning at 0:50 through the end of the clip.

I hope to see the return of boisterous and joyful singing well before Christmas 2022, but the only way that we can responsibly allow for congregational musical participation at Christmas 2021 is if you follow the example of Charlie Brown’s friends in their quieter mood.

Services Will Be Livestreamed

Our services will be livestreamed for those who are not comfortable being with us in person, or who for any reason are unable to join us on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. We encourage you to join us via YouTube at the links provided in the service listings on our website home page.

Why Not Cancel Services Entirely?

It may be helpful to know why we decided to proceed with in-person services, albeit with reduced choral music and limited congregational participation, when so many other parishes and dioceses have decided to cancel their services. We recognize that local context matters a great deal, so we are in no position to judge either favourably or unfavourably our brothers and sisters in Christ who have chosen to express their intent to act responsibly in other ways, including by offering services online only, or not at all.

For me, it comes down to this: If we are committed to undertaking the Friday Food Ministry on Christmas Eve, we must be at least as equally committed to offering in-person Mass on Christmas Eve. No one has suggested we cancel the Friday Food Ministry (FFM), because that would be abdicating our responsibility to feed the hungry. It is obvious that we must seek to serve others as Christ served us. Thus, the question was never “Should we cancel FFM?” but rather “What can we do that will ensure we are undertaking FFM in the most responsible way possible under the current circumstances, so that those who volunteer are reasonably protected, and so that our guests will be fed?” After all, we believe that when we feed others, it is possible to have an authentic encounter with Christ.

If we recognize that the physical food the church provides our guests in the Friday Food Ministry is central to our mission, what about the spiritual food that makes our mission and ministry possible in the first place? The worship of God in the beauty of holiness, with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, is why we exist as a parish, and everything we do flows from that. On this great feast of the Incarnation, therefore, we will celebrate the coming of the One who gave himself to us so that we, in the Friday Food Ministry, in our music and liturgy, in our preaching, and in a myriad of other ways, might be faithful to the call that St. Thomas’s parish has to be a place where all may encounter the Incarnate and Risen Lord, every single day of the year.

As Fr. James Shire so beautifully put it in last Saturday’s edition of the Thurible, “We can all make these dark and unsettling times bright. Acts of love, charity, and service announce the coming of Christ into the world, and they draw people to him just as the shepherds were drawn to the Christ child by the proclamation of the angels. In this confluence of love, service, time, and space, we can find a little of the old Bethlehem out in front of St. Thomas’s on Huron Street.” To which I would only add that we find the source and destination of that self-emptying love for the world whenever we gather, virtually or in person, at God’s altar.

Above the altar at St. Thomas’s, at the top of the reredos can be seen the words “Sic Deus dilexit mundum,” that is, “For God so loved the world,” which of course is the beginning of one of the most famous verses in the Bible, John 3:16, a verse many have called “the Gospel in miniature”: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” The Friday Food Ministry is one small way that we respond to God’s love for the world. Christmas, on the other hand, is our answer to how much God loves the world.

O come, let us adore him.

Yours in Christ’s service,

N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector

 
Source: www.stthomas.on.ca/message-from-the-rector

Living Lives of Faith, Hope and Love

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

Stylized typography poster with text of Philippians 4-6: Be anxious for nothing etc

With the rise of a new variant of concern in this wretched pandemic, some of us may have renewed feelings of powerlessness or anxiety (or both, among many other possible feelings). When we cannot plan our holiday outings and gatherings without wondering whether all our plans will come to naught, the best thing we can do is ask God to give us the grace to live in hope. Though they won’t necessarily get us out of this mess, hope, faith, and love are the gifts of the Holy Spirit that will get us through all our troubles and afflictions, our trials and tribulations, and through our mundane daily disappointments and frustrations, as well.

In such times as these, it is important to remember that it is perfectly fine to feel what we are feeling, especially if we are not feeling especially fine! Life brings us both consolation and desolation; sometimes it will feel like we are getting far more than our fair share of the bad and not nearly enough of the good. But, with St. Paul, I remain convinced that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

At Morning Prayer on Friday, after we prayed the Litany together, our seminarian Daniel McCarley mentioned the Supplication on pages 35–37 of the BCP. The rubric is that it be used “especially in the Penitential Seasons and in times of trouble.” So we prayed it at the end of Morning Prayer, and I commend it to you for your personal devotions, as well. Both the Litany and Supplication can be found online courtesy of the Prayer Book Society of Canada, as can its superb Common Prayer mobile app.

 
 

Every time I pray the Litany itself, I am struck anew by how timeless it is. Certainly its majestic language is of an era, as the Litany was the first service in English to be authorized for public worship in the Church of England in 1544, several years before the first Book of Common Prayer was promulgated, in 1549. But if we pay attention to it rather than simply rattle it off, we will find that its contents resonate deeply with where we find ourselves today.

One thing really good liturgy does is reflect accurately who we are in relationship to God, our neighbours, ourselves, and all of creation. Since human nature and creation have not changed in their essence since 1544, the petitions of the Litany speak to what we need and want God to do for us, and remind us of what God has in fact accomplished for us in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I’m not going to go into full-on didactic commentary mode here, tempting though that may be (and I know everyone reading this letter would love nothing more than a pedantic disquisition, given all the free time we are enjoying in this season). Those of you who tire of my pontificating can stop here, but a few catechetical notes may be helpful to those of us interested in praying the Litany with more intentionality.

So in what follows, I will provide a summary of how the Litany functions like a catechism oriented toward the truth that lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi – that is, praying shapes believing, and believing shapes how we live, with God’s help.

Plainchant and text "Spare us good Lorde."

The Litany begins by clarifying to Whom our prayers are directed (the Trinity) and what we are praying for in general (God’s mercy). What “mercy” means is then defined more specifically in the next petition: “Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers; spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood.” In response, we sum up that petition by praying “Spare us, good Lord.” We don’t repeat this response as we do with all the others, because God already knows why we are praying the Litany in the first place. This petition serves to define for us why we are doing what we are doing.

But what does it mean for God to “spare” us? It means to be delivered from all the evils of this world, which are helpfully enumerated in the next five petitions. The first three petitions basically sum up the Seven Deadly Sins, which are all too relevant in all our lives. Curiously, sloth and greed are not explicitly singled out, but the purpose of these three petitions is to convict our hearts of the fact that we have, in the words of the General Confession at Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, “left undone those things which we ought to have done, and…done those things which we ought not to have done.” The Litany itself is a sort of expanded commentary on the General Confession; compare the two and you’ll see for yourself. (There’s a good blog post about the forms of confession in the 1662 BCP here.)

Plainchant and text "Good Lorde deliver us."

While the first three “Good Lord, deliver us” petitions are concerned with personal sin, the second two are concerned with the results of our sin. As a consequence of the Fall of Humankind, the world isn’t what it should be: We are beset by natural disasters, disease (!), and violence. Further, our corporate sins manifest themselves both in Church and State: We betray lawful authority in the civil sphere, and in the ecclesiastical sphere, we fall away from both orthodoxy and orthopraxy, which, as Methodist pastor Jason Valendey has written, are unified only when God gives us orthocardia, which sounds like a terrible disease, but is in fact what it means to be given the grace of a redeemed heart that desires to live in truth and love.

But exactly how does God change our hearts and redeem us, despite the consequences of sin and death that continue to surround us in this mortal life? To find out, read the final four petitions to which we respond with “Good Lord, deliver us.” (A catechetical oration on petitions six through nine may be coming to a pulpit near you, perhaps in Lent.)

The rest of the petitions, to which we reply, “We beseech thee, good Lord,” comprise literally a litany of all the gifts of grace that we cannot acquire through our own merits or control through our own powers. These petitions concern what we need from God in order for humanity and creation to flourish. And again, these petitions address both the corporate level of Church and State and the personal level of individuals, families, and relationships.

I could do a deep dive into the twenty-three times we beseech God prior to wrapping up the Litany with an appeal to Christ in the final section ending with the Kyrie, but you’ll have to be content with a few words on the final two petitions in this section, which to me is the crux of the matter, and arguably the single biggest challenge that faces us as we seek a redeemed heart that desires to live in truth and love. The first is, “To forgive our enemies, persecutors, and slanderers, and to turn their hearts,” which is a tall order in and of itself, but note that it is immediately followed by “To give us true repentance…to amend our lives…” These two petitions go hand-in-hand. We can’t simply want “them” to change without recognizing that “we,” too, need to change. Immediately after praying that God would “turn their hearts,” we turn around and pray that God would turn our hearts through repentance, or conversion, which literally means “turn around.”

Much of my ministry is centred on this dynamic between forgiving our enemies and taking responsibility for our own ongoing conversion. While much of this spiritual work is interior and individual in nature, when God gives us a redeemed heart that desires to live in truth and love and we do exercise the discipline of forgiveness, it has a tangible corporate dimension. The word for that dimension is “reconciliation.” Reconciliation is what happens when God works through our prayer to shape our believing, so that we can live lives of faith, hope, and love. This personal and corporate work continues whether the times are good or ill, although our current circumstances certainly provide particular challenges when it comes to our common life. We are “living in the meantime,” waiting for the day to come when litanies and supplications will be unnecessary because all things—all people and all of creation—will be reconciled in Christ. And so our Advent prayer must always be Maranatha, O Lord, come quickly!

Yours in Christ’s service,

N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector

 

CONFESSIONS IN ADVENT

Christmas is only a few days away, and the clergy are available by appointment to meet with you to make your confession in preparation for this great feast, so “that we, without shame or fear, may rejoice to behold his appearing,” as the proper preface for the season of Advent promises us. If you have never made your confidential confession before, or have never experienced the liberating power of the sacrament of reconciliation in the way it is intended as a gift from God, you are warmly invited to do so this year. The easiest way to make an appointment for a confession with Fr. Humphrey is to visit rector.youcanbook.me at your convenience to choose a time during his office hours on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. You can also arrange a time to meet on any day of the week except for Mondays via email: frhumphrey@stthomas.on.ca. Likewise, Fr. D’Angelo may be reached via frdangelo@stthomas.on.ca and Fr. Shire via frshire@stthomas.on.ca. Any of the clergy who serve as celebrants of our weekday Masses would also be happy to be of assistance, and the parish clergy can easily put you in touch with any priest whose contact information you do not already have. Fr. D’Angelo is compiling a list of area clergy who are available to serve in this capacity, and all members of St. Thomas’s are encouraged to make their confessions to a priest prior to Christmas and Easter every year, and at other times as may be advisable for the comfort and edification of their souls. —Fr. Humphrey

Source: www.stthomas.on.ca/message-from-the-rector