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Adam Un(y)bound

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The Lord God commanded Adam, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” (Genesis 2:16-17) There is an early 15 th century English Catholic (or just “English Christian”) text (which is probably, in fact, known to some of you blessed church nerds and musicians) called Adam lay ybounden. The Poem was written somewhere between the late 1300’s and the early 1400’s and, while it is written in English…. it’s not exactly… our English…. However, like most poetry and verse, it usually sounds better when we read it as written…. but before I subject you to that… The most interesting thing about this work is not the language itself, but the implications that the verses are making - an intriguing glimpse into medieval theology which takes a familiar story and moves it in an… interesting direction. Here is the text as it was written: ...
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Beloved Dust (Ash Wednesday)

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Who are you beneath the mask? The person whom nobody else knows.                         Perhaps not even your spouse. Who are you beneath the mask?             That person whom only God has seen.                         In that Secret Place. In that place where the thoughts of our hearts are laid bare before the Living God of all Creation. In Culturally Christian (and particularly Catholic) countries throughout the World, the season between the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6 th ) and Shrove Tuesday (the last day before Lent) was historically a festival period of Carnivale - time of celebration and, for many, of wild abandon. Normal social conventions were often...
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The Word made Flesh

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Trinity Episcopal Church (Christmas Sermon 2019) In the beginning was the Word. For when all things began the Word already was. That Word dwelt with God. And What God was, the Word was. That Divine Word, then, was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be. No single thing was created without him. All that came to be, was alive with his Life - And that life was the light of humankind. The Light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never quenched it. [1] There was a time when everything (and everyone) we have ever seen – everything we’ve ever touched, tasted, smelled, or heard - was not. When reality, the cosmos, the atoms and energy that make up our universe (our bodies) simply were not (did not exist). Whether one subscribes to the idea of the Big Bang (proposed by Catholic Priest George Lemaitre), or Stephen Hawkings’ idea that the substance of the universe just kind of emerged out of no-space and no-time, or any of the va...
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