When Love Shows Up: Weekly Reflections about God's Presence The Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

This podcast is about love, so let's talk about what the church preaches about love. We say that we should love others as Jesus first loved us. We say we should love our enemies. We say to should love generously, sacrificially even. But do we practice what we preach?

Yes, of course we do. Sometimes. I've seen extraordinary love inside the church, and from the church toward the world. I've spent most of my life working in the church, and I've seen a lot of exemplary love in those years. I've also seen us fall short plenty of times. After all, the church is made up of people, and we're all sinners. So the church will never be perfect, at least not until Jesus comes again to sort it all out.

For now, I wanted to celebrate a time I saw -- I felt -- the church practice what it preaches.

It all happened in 2022 when I almost died. I was passing through Singapore airport on my way to Vietnam for vacation. But my body had other ideas. My heart stopped. And when I collapsed from my heart stopping, I hit my head and received a pretty serious brain injury. After 59 minutes of CPR, I was rushed to a nearby hospital. It turns out that the hospital closest to Singapore airport is one of the best heart hospitals in the world.

I was in the hospital for two weeks, including several days of complete sedation so the swelling in my brain could go down. When I was discharged from the hospital, I was in a wheelchair. My brain wasn't quite working right, as it continued to heal. By then, Sherilyn, my spouse, had arrived. We couldn't go home until the doctors said my brain was well enough healed to travel by air. So we were stuck in Singapore for a few weeks.

I went to Italy for the first time in February of 2000. I was a 20-year-old Junior in college, and I was minoring in Italian. I had no Italian ancestry, and no cultural obsession with Italy or the Roman Empire. I was not in love with an Italian coed. I tell you this only because these are all the questions I get asked when I mention studying Italian.

My reasons for studying Italian were much more capricious. I had taken Spanish, German, and Japanese classes at different points growing up, and heading to college I decided I wanted to try a new language. I also decided that I should try to become fluent in whatever language I chose. I was 18 when I decided this. I did not expect to advance any specific career or spiritual goal. I just wanted to be able to watch the Godfather movies without subtitles, and to listen to Italian-American singer Louis Prima and know what he was singing half the time. This was the depth of my decision making.

During my sophomore year it became apparent that studying abroad for at least a semester was an expectation, so I set about looking at programs in Italy, and settled on one in the Northeastern city of Padova (we English speakers call it Padua) because all the classes were taught in Italian, and they had no lessons on Fridays, so students could have long weekends to travel.

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The only symptom of pre-eclampsia that I knew of was swollen ankles, and my ankles were fine. I was 25 weeks pregnant, and running late to my follow-up ultrasound appointment...late enough that I almost skipped it. I had figured that the headaches and occasional blurry vision I experienced were probably related to the stress of my first year of teaching. I didn't realize that those were signs of a problem with my pregnancy. My husband John had to work late that day, so I went to the doctor's appointment by myself. I figured that it would be routine. I was thinking about what I would make for dinner that night. I didn't notice until later that the ultrasound technician was far less talkative than he had been during my last appointment, 6 weeks prior.

By the time I opened the door afterward to return to the consult room, the technician had pulled my obstetrician from a delivery. The doctor was standing in the doorway in his blue surgical scrubs. He told me that the ultrasound showed that I had severe pre-eclampsia. He said that there was a 100 percent chance that my baby would be born premature. He said that I was in danger of having a stroke, and that the wait would be too long for an ambulance to take me to the hospital, so his nurse was going to drive me. Then he asked me to sit down so that he could check my blood pressure. It was...high.

For the next ten days, I was on monitored bed rest at the state teaching hospital. I underwent treatment to prevent a stroke, and received two rounds of a steroid to develop the baby's lungs. After ten days, when my blood pressure rose to a dangerous level and stayed there, and the baby was showing signs of distress, the doctors delivered her. Our daughter Katherine Grace was born at 27 weeks' gestation. She was twelve inches long. She weighed one pound, four ounces.

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I was 41, standing in my kitchen with my hand in a bowl full of flour and water and salt, and I did not hear God talk to me. I didn't hear much of anything, other than the same Ella Fitzgerald album on endless repeat from the speaker on the kitchen counter. I was about 5 months into leading our church in a pandemic. I felt isolated and stir crazy and very tired of my beautiful family. I was insecure about the future of our church, which felt small compared to the fact that I was scared for the future of our country. On top of that, In the last month our dog had died, and we had moved into a smaller house. I was confused and exhausted and heartbroken.For whatever reason, COVID-19 did not bring about a crisis of belief for me. That is not a brag, just a strange statement of fact. It had been 21 years since the moment on the hillside when I heard God's voice and realized I believed. 21 years later, and I was pretty sure I believed in God at least once a day every day. But I was in despair because I wasn't sure I believed in people anymore. I mean, I knew people existed, I just wasn't sure why, or what we were doing with this gift of life. A lot of despair there.And though I believed in God, I did not hear their voice. So, I did what many sensible White men did during the pandemic: I started making sourdough bread.A parishioner I love very much gave me some of his starter and a basic recipe and I went at it. If the sea made me realize how small I was when my feelings were too big, making bread somehow made me feel like I could actually do something when I felt powerless in so many other ways. There are many feelings from the pandemic we have not processed. We have no idea, for instance, how to grieve over a million people dead - we just don't have the cultural mechanisms in place to process the enormity of that. Likewise, I don't think we have really dealt with just how powerless we all felt for so long. How little we felt we could do to make things better.I was no different. I may have been in charge of a church, but I felt powerless and useless. I would work 40-50 hours a week and not feel like anything happened.And then I started making bread. I loved it immediately. Like the first time I heard Sgt. Pepper or the first time my wife and I made eye contact. That kind of love. And I know. I know how ridiculous that sounds. How dramatic. And I am not saying I'm great at making bread. I'm just telling you that in the middle of every single thing being terrible, Love showed up, and it looked like carbs.

I was 20 years old, walking a trail on the side of a hill in Northwestern Italy when I heard God speak to me. I was by myself, having walked far ahead of my traveling companions, and I was stuck in my head. These particular hills are right on the edge of the Ligurian Sea, and every single view is breathtaking, and I was paying attention to none of them. I was too busy being heartbroken. Throughout college I was mostly involved with one person, and our relationship ended and began again a couple times. This was one of the times it had ended.

I rounded a corner and looked up and outward despite myself. Water. So much water. And I remember thinking that this sea had been here so long before I was ever a person and would be here so long after I was gone. I was so small. My sadness was so small. There was so much more than me. Look, I know this was not the most profound or original thought, but I was a heartbroken 20-year-old in Italy. It was enough to shake me out of my doldrums and open me up to everything that was around me. And as I looked out on the sea, I heard God say, "You believe in me."

It was not a command so much as an observation. God was letting me know something that was true about me. And it mattered. As I have mentioned, I was not, in that exact moment, thinking about God. I was thinking about a girl. And I wasn't praying or meditating or anything like that. I was not seeking spiritual enlightenment or comfort. I had not invited God into my heart or into the conversation at all really. But there God was. Telling me I believed.

How hard can that be? Get some ketchup from the grocery store.

Problem was, there in front of me, staring at me like a Martian in a nightmare of inundation, were exactly fourteen different types of ketchup: classic, sugar free, spicy jalapeno, carrot ketchup, no-mato, restaurant style, chili-pepper ketchup, ketchup with a blend of veggies, curry ketchup, Tapatio, habanero, rainbow ketchup for kids, some fancy pants organic stuff in a glass jar, and the ever present Heinz 57.

I stood there looking at each one. The list just said "ketchup." So, which one do I choose?

I started reading nutrition labels and checking prices. I felt my heart rate increase steadily as I broke into a cold sweat.