July 23, 2019

To love is to see

Sermon at St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Roanoke, Va., on July 14, 2019, the fifth Sunday after Pentecost, two Sundays before the last Sunday before I stepped away from my work there as director of music in order to begin studies at Virginia Theological Seminary, as a postulant for holy orders (priesthood) in the Episcopal Diocese of Southwestern Virginia.

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“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.
“Do this and you will live.”

Jesus reaches back into the Hebrew law to answer this.
But then, the lawyer asks a second question, maybe because, well, he is a lawyer.

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July 2, 2019

A family funeral: Generations past and present

Today, our family came together in Page County, Va. at the church where my sister and I (and our parents, and our grandparents, and cousins and aunts and uncles) grew up, for the funeral of my father‘s oldest brother, Bill Modisett. He was a quiet man who loved reading about history and current events. He graduated with a chemistry degree from Bridgewater College in the 1950s and spent most of his life living on the family farm and working at Luray Caverns. His presence was always a quiet and calm one, his smile and laugh a lot like Dad’s.

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April 19, 2019

Gardens from Ruins

A sermon delivered at St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Roanoke, Virginia, on Good Friday, 2019 (April 19).

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

The first time I visited London, England, nearly 50 years had passed since the end of World War II, but you could still see the scars. One of our teachers showed us small, ragged pockmarks in the sides of great lion sculptures along the Thames, where shell fragments had struck them. The Imperial War Museum and other sites narrate the violence of the battles and the violence of the Holocaust. German bombs fell on the city for six years, killing 30,000 people and destroying 70,000 buildings. The beloved dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral survived because teams of people remained at the church round the clock, chasing after and disposing of anything that fell on its roof. And even that St. Paul’s, if you go a few more centuries back in history, was reborn after its own destruction – the previous St. Paul’s, a massive Gothic structure, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 – the one we know was designed by the architect Christopher Wren, who re-visioned not only the churches but the very layout of London itself in the years following that great disaster.

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April 11, 2019

An Extraordinary Cat

We said goodbye to Lucy Tuesday afternoon. She was a musicians’ cat, the cat of my heart, a talkative extrovert who loved the vocalists, flutists, clarinetists, cellists and violinists (including the beginners) who came over to rehearse. She loved Satie, Hindemith, Liszt, Brahms and Debussy, though she could take or leave Bach and Beethoven.

Lucy was adopted more than 15 years ago from the Roanoke Valley SPCA when I just went to look, a lone little black kitten who purred in my arms for a while. I had to leave the next day for a week on a magazine project, and called the SPCA every afternoon to see if she had been adopted (they couldn’t reserve a cat, though I wonder if they did, unofficially, that once); on Friday she was still there, so I canceled my last interview, drove three and half hours home, arrived as they were closing up and adopted her without a litter box to my name. We walked in the house and she immediately knew she was home.

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December 22, 2018

The Stars Singing: An Advent Meditation

This reflection was written for the 2018 half-day retreat at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Christiansburg, Va. The Ann-Frances Chapter of the Daughters of the King holds this quiet day every Advent and Lent. The first meditation for the retreat, “Voice, Music, Prayer,” can be found here.

Creator of the stars of night,
your people’s everlasting light
O Christ, Redeemer of us all,
we pray you hear us when we call. 

When this old world drew on toward night,
you came, but not in splendor bright,
not as a monarch, but the child
of Mary, blameless mother mild. continue reading.

December 22, 2018

Voice, Music, Prayer: An Advent Meditation

This reflection was written for the 2018 half-day retreat at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Christiansburg, Va. The Ann-Frances Chapter of the Daughters of the King holds this quiet day every Advent and Lent. The second meditation for the retreat, “The Stars Singing,” can be read here.

I have a friend who is an operatic soprano. A few years ago, one Christmas Eve in Memphis, Tennessee, 12 hours’ drive from where I was born and from where my parents and sister and niece and nephew gathered to celebrate Christmas without me, I stood in the side chapel of a darkened, candlelit church, listening to her sing “O Holy Night,” and I wept. That’s what her voice can do.

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November 25, 2018

Dissonance and the Hope of Harmony

A “dissonant day.” That’s what the Reverend Barbara Kay Lunblad, a Lutheran pastor who’s taught at Yale, Princeton and Union Theological Seminary, calls today – a “dissonant” day of clashing images, one “big and powerful, the other small and poor.”

This is a day like the chord you just heard, made up of notes that aren’t in harmony with one another. Christ the King Sunday tells part of the violent end-and-not-end of Christ’s story, just before we begin to tell the beginning of it, this Sunday before Advent.

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November 6, 2018

Vote for the Human Family

For the past two years, I’ve watched, with many others, the normalization of hate, fear, gun violence, dishonesty, racism, sexism; attacks on citizens voicing their conscience, attacks on the free press, on good journalists who make it their job to be sure truth is known.

I’ve watched this country step away from our stewardship of the world – our fellow humanity, and the environment that sustains us – rolling back environmental protections, demonizing refugees and admiring leaders who do not value the human rights and equality our country names as its values.

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