The Diocesan Altar Guild of Iowa

A Light in the Sacristy

A newsletter for and about the Altar Guilds in the Diocese of Iowa

Contents: Page From the Bishop……….…1 Director’s Letter……...…..1 The Bookshelf…...…….... 3 Oldest Book………..…….4 Ecclesiastical Easter Eggs 5 Customary Lenten Foods...6 Poems For Easter………...7 Do Ask! Do Tell!...............8 Lenten Altars……………..8 Funerals…………………..9 Resurrection…………….10 .

Winter 2014 Issue # 25

Published Quarterly

Director:

Martha Hippee 407 28th St. Des Moines, IA 50312-4405 (515)244-5824 hipowls@mchsi.com Newsletter preparation: Jeanne Roland, St. Mark’s, Des Moines JeanneHR@q.com This Newsletter is also available at: www.iowaepiscopal.org

FROM THE BISHOP This year’s Lenten Dioce san book study is Anthony Robinson’s “Changing the Conversations”. Beginning with Ash Wednesday, we will post a blog on the Dio- cesan web site with thoughts on two of the ten chapters or “conversations” that Robinson claims we need to change in the Church if we are to become more vital in God’s mission. This will be re-peated for each of the first four weeks of Lent, and on the Saturday before the Fifth Sunday in Lent – April 5 – Dr. Robinson will be with us in Des Moines for the Baptismal Living Day event. I am encouraging congregations to bring teams of interested people to that event. Lent is a good time for studying together. I have mentioned how the Al-tar Guild of St Columba’s in Camarillo met monthly with the clergy around the mid-week Eucharist. It was an im-portant opportunity to keep connected, do some teaching, and share the com-mon concern for the people of St Columba’s whom we all served. I am aware that many of our congregations are small in number and that the altar guilds are probably proportionate to that. However, there can be great good to be enjoyed by seeking out one anoth-er for intentional fellowship of Word and Sacraments as an Altar Guild as part of your Lenten discipline. Perhaps there could be a Chapter or regional gathering arranged for the season. (continued on page 2)

DIRECTOR’S LETTER It is yet another snowy, winter world, cold, and quiet, as I write this, but with the expectation of fiercely blowing snow and sub-zero wind chills! One recent snowy day I read and cherished this thought: “In winter our gardens, like we ourselves, must have the will and determination to make it through the months of darkness —to face the cold and wind and yet survive. Patience is required during these dormant times, as well as trust that transformation is taking place and that spring will come again.” Let’s lis-ten intently for the soft beats of spring and look closely (and longingly for a few green shoots. We are now approaching the Lenten season which begins with Ash Wednes-day on March 5. As altar guild mem-bers it is a time of preparation of the sanctuary and a time of introspection in anticipation of the celebration of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. The season of Lent originated in the fourth century and spans 40 weekdays begin-ning on Ash Wednesday and culminat-ing in Holy Week with Maundy Thurs-day, Good Friday and Holy Saturday preceding Easter. Originally, Lent was the time of preparation for those who were to be baptized, a time of study and prayer. Have you ever wondered why Lent is 40 days? Luke’s Gospel says “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jor-dan and was led by the Spirit in the (continued on page 2)

FROM THE BISHOP (continued from page 1) Recently I was privileged to preside and preach at the celebration of life of former ISU Chaplain Doug Haviland. Doug served from 1962 to 1991 in Ames. He was a schol-arly man and I prepared for the service by going through some of his sermons. He was a devotee of Dante, and every Lent he would re-read “Purgatory”, which he saw as the journey of the restoration of faith. “There is nothing punitive”, he said, “about the disci-pline necessary to gain the prize which we were all created to achieve – the final plan – entering heaven”. He also spoke a lot in the aftermath of 9/11 at which he and his wife Betty lost their son about the war against evil – an issue which, as he would assert, was no longer an activity of speculative leisure for him but an urgent problem for us all. The answer was to be found in the One who alone could transform human hearts which is where evil’s origins lie. I have been struck of late about this ele-ment of urgency as it relates to the Christian mission. Use Lent to do something that shifts you from leisurely speculation to passionate urgency. It was after all the latter that drove Jesus on with His face fixed on Jerusalem as Luke describes it from the Transfiguration story of the Last Sunday of Epiphany through to the encounters of Holy Week. Help each other by being intentional about your community as an Altar Guild. Show your leadership in the congregation by com-ing together, perhaps, around Robinson’s book and sending your representative to the Baptismal Living Day. If there are not enough of you to feel that you are a critical mass, first know that for Jesus that means “where two or three are gathered together”, and second, look up your counterparts across the way, even ecumenically in the same town, and take the initiative to form a joint group. Your faithfulness makes worship hap-pen week in and week out. May it also in-spire you to enrich the spiritual vitality of your community. Alan+

THE DIRECTOR’S LETTER (continued from page 1) desert, where for 40 days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry. The rain lasted forty days in the mighty flood (according to Noah). Moses stayed on Mount Sinai for forty days (ex. 24:18). Jonah gave the people of Nineveh forty days to repent. (Jon. 3:4) Another important little fact you may remem-ber is that the counting of the forty days does not include Sundays. Why? Because Sundays are always days of celebration in the Christian church and are not included in the forty fast days of Lent. Sundays commemorate the Resurrec-tion. I hope that as you prepare the altar for Lent you will embrace those forty days of introspec-tion and self examination in preparation for East-er. I love you all and send blessings and wishes for a Holy Lent and a glorious Alleluia Easter. Martha ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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That our mature years are less strenuous than the first half of our life can be accounted for by a certain contentment that is achieved by aging...that we don't have to always be right, always win ever battle fought., or alas, win every one we start by our need to compete. That we can let go of our view of the tragic sense of or even of the idealistic sense of life and just accept that life is. We have learned, Father Rohr says, that “the Eight Beatitudes, speak to you more that the Ten Command-ments.” Indeed, chapter 10, “A Bright Sadness,” speaks as if someone has been looking in on our lives and planned our last act as one of contentment, a contentment brought on by the earned ability to contemplate what all has been. And one of the contemplative blessings is our ability to learn from what we used to exclude. Father Rohr points out that “Jesus was a send-half-of -life man teaching a first-half-of-life history, church and culture.” Now in or second half, we understand “why Jesus is always welcoming the outsider, the foreigner, the sinner, the wounded one.” That we have reached this place speaks of wisdom hard earned on our journey: to be whole, we must see and create wholeness: “split people see and create splits in every-thing and everybody.” Father Rohr says that we get to the whole by falling down into the messy parts...where we long and thirst for the wholeness and fullness of all things, includ-ing ourselves...the only and lasting meaning of up.” As I read this book, my mind kept turn-ing to Rabbi Ben Ezra, Robert Browning’s lovely poem. Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life for which the first was made! Our times are in His hands Who saith, “A whole I planned, Youth shows by half, trust God, see all, Nor be afraid! Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward will speak to you on many levels and deserves a place on your nigh stand.

THE BOOKSHELF Polly Marshall For those of us feeling the pinch of years, we can thank Richard Rohr for his insightful book Falling Upward:A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. Father Rohr, a Fran- ciscan priest, is the founder and di- rector of the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico. Weaving literature and experience, Fa-ther Rohr shows how, through the ages, the search for meaning has been a con-stant, and that only through struggle is a transformation achieved; that those of us who face doubt and despair are the luck ones for in the facing comes peace. Paula d Arcy’s “god comes to you disguised as your life” is only one of the thought-provoking gems that Father Rohr places n our path. Each chapter is headed with epi-grams for contemplation. Carl Jung asserts that “One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening and what in the morning was true will at even-ing have become a lie.” Thus Father Rohr’s belief that in the first half of life we are to create the container; the second half to fill it with soul discoveries, all this an easier task to accomplish if we remem-ber that God is the potter, we are the clay. What Rohr calls “soul discovery” we come to by different means. Suffering seems o be the traditional way. Obviously for the reader, that discovery is easily found through myths and legends, litera-ture both biblical and secular, classical through modern, and across all cultures for these are the things we have a hand...along with a contemplative mind, which most readers have or we wouldn’t find such delight in what can be a mostly solitary undertaking.

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THE OLDEST BOOK IN ENGLAND The Rt. Rev. Kirk S. Smith, Bishop of Arizo-na, The Episcopal Diocese of Arizona, Phoenix, reprinted with permission Many of you had an opportunity to watch the installation service for the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. For me, a special moment of the service came when the Archbishop took his oath of office on a Gospel book which was over 1,400 years old. That an-cient manuscript is an object which has fascinated me ever since I saw it for the first time before the Lam-beth Conference of 2008. I have since returned to Cam-bridge to study it as the foundation of a book project I am working on. I have shared my interest in this book, and its implications for us Anglicans, in a num-ber of Sunday “Bishop’s Forums” around the Dio-cese. Here is a short sum-mary of that work, which was run by the Episcopal Café on the day of the ser-vice at Canterbury. I will let you know when I get the finished! On March 21, when Jus-tin Welby takes his vows as 105th Archbishop of Can-terbury, he will place his hands on an ob-ject that physically and spiritually binds him to his predecessors. It is an ancient Gospel book, the oldest in England, given to the first Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Augustine, by Pope Gregory the Great around the year 597. The “St. Augustine's Gospels” has a history rich in importance for Anglicans and indeed for Christians everywhere. It is

the oldest nonarcheological object in Great Britain, having remained on English soil continuously since its arrival nearly 1400 year ago. It contains some remarkable illu-minated illustrations, among them the earli-est portrayal of the Last Supper in exist-ence. Its very preservation was due to Archbishop’s Mathew Parker’s desire at the time of he English reformation to prove the historical continuity between the eccle-sia primitva, the church of the Apostles and the newly reformed English Church of which he was the spiritual head, the eccle-sia anglicana.

The manuscript when not being used at enthronement ceremonies of new Archbish-ops in Canterbury, resides among other priceless national treasures in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where it goes by the name known to scholars of medieval history, MS CCC 286.* Apart from its historic and artistic importance, this treas-ure of our faith embodies some lessons which are as im-portant for the church today as they were for the infant Eng-lish church of the 6th Century. It first of all reminds us that Anglican history is inti-mately connected with the idea of mission. Indeed there

would be no Church of England if it had not been for Pope Gregory’s desire to bring the Good News to those Anglo Saxon boys he encountered in the Roman Slave market whom he famously called, “non Angli, sed angeli, (not Angles, but Angels).” That spirit of mission has prevailed throughout the history of the Church of England. The Church of England accompanied the ex-pansion of the British Empire, and as a re-sult, “the sun never sets” on some part of the world-wide Anglican Communion. (continued on page 7)

ECCLESIASTICAL EASTER EGGS: Learn to create Ukrainian Pysanky Easter eggs

Come spend a morning in March making Ukrainian Easter eggs and exploring their symbol-ism. Learn the traditional technique for creating Ukrainian Easter eggs. Since before the time

of Christ, eggs have been a symbol of new life, rebirth, and the coming of spring, which easily translates for Christians to the Resurrection, with its promise of eternal life. But whether or not that belief is part of your tradition, they are an incredibly beautiful and engaging art form. Ukrainian pysanky or “written” eggs have a wealth of symbolism. This is a thousand year old art form. A pysanky egg can be “read”— for each color and each design element has a symbolic meaning, such as the ears of Mary, or Jacob’s ladder, just as though it were written in words. This method for creating pysanky eggs has been passed down from generation to generation. Pysanky are made us-

ing a resist process, similar to batik. Beeswax is applied, using special tools, and then the egg is dyed. The process us repeated, working from light to dark colors, until the beautiful design is complete. Then the wax is removed over a candle flame, to reveal it. Legend has it that as long as pysanky are decorated, good will prevail over evil throughout the world. ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR: The instructor is Sally Bates, a member of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul and its altar guild and choir. Sally has taught classes in the making of Pysanky eggs for the last ten years and learned the technique from Sharon Looschen, a former member of St. Paul’s. Sally has worked in batik for 35 years and taught at the Des Moines Art Center at one time. CLASSES: Classes will be taught at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in its Undercroft, on Saturday, March 15, from 10:00AM to 1:00PM. All materials, including eggs, will be provided. Pre-registration is necessary as materials need to be gathered. You may call Sally Bates at 515-274-2480 or the church at 515-288-7297. Cost of the course is $25.00 and, after expenses have been paid, Sally will donate any profit to the Bishop’s Alleluia Fund. The class fee may be paid at the time of the class.

Hope you can join us on March 15!

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OLDEST BOOK (continued from page 4) By sending a Gospel book with Au-gustine that contained he very earliest illustration of the life of Christ, Gregory displayed a willingness to embrace the newest technology in the service of he Gospel. For a sixth century Anglo Sax-on to see a printed portrait of Jesus must have been as breathtaking and revolution-ary as the effect our smart phones have on our own lives. Sadly, the 21st century church has been reluctant to follow Au-gustine’s lead in using the new technolo-gy of our own day. For example, only a small handful of American Episcopal bishops have Twitter accounts, and less than 20% of all American churches have up-to-date web sites, although 80% of those looking for a church to attend first consult the web. Archbishop Mathew Parker’s desire to establish the continuity of the ancient church with the church of his day is a powerful example to those who believe that embracing the “ancient/future” church Is a powerful evangelistic tool. Many churches now make use of such ancient practices as chant, incense, walking the labyrinth, icons, and methods of medita-tion as a regular part of their spiritual of-ferings. There is room for more use of such disciplines which have an enormous appeal, especially to un-churched young people. Finally, the symbolic veneration of MS 286 by both the former Archbishop Rowan Williams and Pope Benedict XVI on his visit to England in 2010, should remind Anglicans of the goal of unity we have with our catholic brothers and sis-ters. The manuscript was given as a gift by the pope to the people of England. It is fitting that this should be a focus of our common mission.

POEMS FOR EASTER THE REVIVAL Henry Vaughan (1621—1695) Unfold! Take in His light, Who makes thy cares more short than night. The joys which with His day-star rise He deals to all but drowsy eyes; And, what the men of this world miss Some drops and dews of future bliss. Hark! How His winds Have chang’d their note! And with warm whispers call the out; The frosts are past, the storms are gone, And backward life at last comes on. The lofty groves in express joys Rely unto the turtle’s voice; And here in dust and dirt, O here The lilies of His love appear! Henry Vaughn was a Welsh poet and Physician, born in Llansanffraid, Mid-Wales, near the Shropshire border, Who studied at Oxford and in London before returning to Wales.

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DO ASK, DO TELL! May Sherrod This column answers some of the many questions receive from altar guild members at parishes across the country. Send us your questions and we will find the answers from those who know!

Q Why do we have piscinas? And what is their purpose?

A I am often asked this question by those in new and young parishes or new church plants. This tradition was established years ago for the disposal of blessed water. The vessels were washed following the ser-vice and piscinas allowed the waste water to be send straight to the ground by way of a special drain. It is not possible to have these drains in some places and the water that is used to clean the vessels should be poured on the ground by a member of the altar guild. Additionally, the water from the baptismal font must be poured on the ground as it had been blessed during the service. Q What should we do with our left over palms? A Unless they have been blessed you ma dispose of hem by recycling. If blessed, use them to create your ashes for the next year’s season of Lent. Should you dis-cover stains on your linens from ashes, spray directly on the stain with Oxi-clean and then launder. Q What is the usual tradition for candles in the chancel that are not lit? Extra gos-pel torches? A They should be removed and left in the Sacristy until needed.

LENTEN ALTARS There are probably more variation in Lenten altars arrangements than in any other season. You will find paraments of purple, ash, burlap, or none at all on altars. Candle-sticks and alms basins may be wooden and altarware ceramics. You may find the usual floral arrangement, but more often wood and sticks or greens. Greens should be treated just like flow-ers. Look for different shades of green or a variegated one. Different structures like tall pointed stems and leaves, rounder leaves, and different sizes. Always get more green than you think you need and a least three kinds. Use the pointed ones to make the out-line of our arrangement and then fill in the space, staying inside the points. With care-ful measuring of the first ones, you can make pairs. When you cut your greens in a garden, take them in and wash them, cut off the ends again and lay them in clan water overnight. If the leaves have a furry back side, just put them in water. Do not lay them down. Be careful not to get new growth with green stems. The older stems are gray or brown and will last. New growth will droop fast. Happy arranging at church and at home. “The smudge of ashes on the brow, The charge, ’Remember, man, that thou Art dust and shalt to dust return—” These are the words, the dictum stern Of God, relayed in rite The ages down to hearts contrite. Remember then, O Ichabod, That dust thou art, gold dust for God.” —Francis Lightbourn

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