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(Note from Christine: I swear that I did not pay Nate to say this!)
Beloved in Christ, I (Nate) have always had one rule: do whatever Christine Lee says, whenever she says it, as soon as she says it. That’s not for no reason. Christine walks closely in step with the Holy Spirit, and has great spiritual intuition. So, when she approached me with the idea for this collaborative project for our two parishes, I was already predisposed to say: “yes.” Once I heard what the project was, it was that much more clear this was something God was calling us to do. We find ourselves in an extraordinary moment in the history of our world. We are, quite literally, living in history--a moment we will look back on for lifetimes to come. Everything has been turned upside down. The loss has been staggering. Grief, anxiety and despair are high. We walk the streets of our beloved city, mourning what once was. We wonder: What will become of it? What will become of...us? And yet, by some miracle of grace, this moment has also brought strange gifts: connection, compassion, courage, creativity, sacrifice, service, laughter. So here we stand, holding two impossibilities side by side. Joy, sorrow, gifts, loss, community, isolation, need and gratitude, all converging upon us at the same time. What are we called to do in a moment like this? When we look back on this moment, how will we hope to have lived through it? Since the beginning of the church, followers of Jesus have gathered at times like this to pray. No matter what was happening in their world--whether persecution, wars, plagues, social and political unrest--prayer has helped the people of God orient themselves to the one who is seated on the throne of the universe. And so, in these ten days between Ascension and Pentecost, we will come before God and pray. In fact, we will return to the central prayer of the Christian faith, the prayer our Lord taught us to pray. Every week, when we pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” we are acknowledging that God’s kingdom has come in Jesus but not yet in its fullness. And so we wait and pray and love and act in this in-between time of the already not yet of God’s kingdom. Both All Angels' and St. Peter’s Chelsea are committed to God’s dream for the world--to make all things new in Christ. We pray with that hope for our city, our loved ones, for the church and for the world. May God give us the grace to be the answer to our prayers, that the gospel would go forth in power through our lives and through the Church of Jesus Christ. Sincerely Christine & Nate The Rev. Christine Lee. The Rev. Nathaniel Jung-Chul Lee Priest-in-Charge, St. Peter's Chelsea Rector, All Angels' Church
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 That's me in my mother's lap and my big sister Grace on the left (sadly my middle sister Eunice got cut out of this shot... sorry Eunice!), circa 1975. I wish I had a better photo of her from my childhood. My parents were poor immigrants from Korea and my mom barely spoke English when they arrived in the U.S. She studied at one of the top universities in Korea and left everything, her family, her friends, her native language and culture behind to come to the States with my father and build a new life for our family. My sisters and I had no idea how poor we were growing up because she made our home feel so abundant with her creativity, resourcefulness and sacrifice. I remember her collecting every penny, nickel and dime in a big jar, sewing our clothes with patterns from McCall's or buying them from garage sales, working in a flower shop to help support the family. We had no idea at the time how lonely she must have felt, giving birth to and raising three daughters in a foreign land. Now she is 80, more frail each time I see her. Many of you had the chance to meet her at the Celebration of a New Journey service back in January. My heart is full of gratitude for the life she has lived, the love she gave, her sincere faith in God that she deposited in me.  Our lives have been shaped by the presence (or absence) of our parents and the lives they have lived, their gifts and their weaknesses. Lisha shared this poem "Bless My Mother's Body" by Marie Howe, read by Padrig O'Tauma here. He writes, "I think the poet here is speaking about all the ways that we carry people who have tried to love us; and maybe the person succeeded, or maybe they didn’t, but nonetheless, we carry their story into our own surviving."
This morning, I'm thinking about the prayers and hopes and fears and sorrow from our intercessions during service on Mother's Day yesterday that revolved around our parents: giving thanks to God for mothers, praying for new and expectant parents as they bring a child into the world in this time, grieving the loss of mothers, fathers and grandparents, praying for parents with cancer and elderly parents who do not have long in this world. There is a Love that is so wide and long and high and deep that it surpasses knowledge (Ephesians 3:18) and encompasses each and every one of us and those we hold most dear. It is that Love that holds us in this vulnerable and uncertain moment, like my mother is holding me in that photo. I pray that you may feel it holding you and your loved ones, whatever today may hold for you.  On days when it’s sunny, I take my old dog-eared copy of Gilead into the park. It’s been years since I’ve read Marilynne Robinson’s novel about a fictional pastor living in a dusty Iowa backwater, writing to his young son as he reflects on life and his own mortality. The book was a huge part of my spiritual formation when I was in college, but I’ve been afraid to pick it up during the pandemic. I used to be so moved by John Ames’ musings on the beauty of the world: “The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine,” or “Each morning I’m like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes–old hands, old eyes, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just remarkable.”
What if they sound trite, or ring hollow, in this new and frightening world? What if this book, which has always been a source of hope and comfort for me, isn’t enough anymore? What I found instead is that I never before fully appreciated the backdrop of hardship that John Ames is writing into. He reflects on his experience of living through 1918 in terms that sound eerily familiar: “People don’t talk much now about the Spanish influenza, but that was a terrible thing. …. We lost so many of the young people. And we got off pretty lightly. People came to church wearing masks, if they came at all. They’d sit as far away from each other as they could. There was talk that the Germans had caused it with some sort of secret weapon, and I think people wanted to believe that, because it saved them from reflecting on what other meaning it might have... It was just like a biblical plague, just exactly.” And of course, there is Ames’ purpose for writing in the first place: he knows that he is dying, and that his young son will grow up with very few memories of his father. John Ames is intimately familiar with sorrow and fear and loneliness and all the things that I’ve been feeling over the last few months, and it’s from this knowledge that he still tells his son: “Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.” Knowing this makes his affirmation of life, his delight in God’s small and everyday gifts, seem richer and more full-throated–more meaningful to me than they ever were before. We want to say a big THANK YOU to Christine's older sister Grace Shim, Executive Director of Cornerstone Counseling Foundation in Chiang Mai, Thailand and her colleague Kevin Hamp, Psychotherapist who specializes in resilience for joining us on our Zoom call last night. They gave us a simple framework for understanding resilience, the "Resilience Donut" for children & youth and adults that helps us draw from resources we already have access to.  You can download their PDF below, chock full of great resources and links to what they referred to in their presentation. 
Sofia is with her mom Martha in upstate New York and we caught up with her to ask a few questions. Sofia, what have been the gifts of this time of quarantine? What have you enjoyed about it? It’s nice to have time to do things. Like art projects or bake or really anything you want. And your school day ends when your work is done. It’s amazing how you have time on a Wednesday night when I’d usually have violin practice from 3-5. We’re rushing home, eating dinner, really quickly taking a shower. I don’t have time like this.  I have more time to hang out to my dog Steve. Steve is a totally different dog here. He doesn’t want to snuggle in NY and now he just wants to love you and it’s just amazing. I have class during the week and enrichment activities. I made this car, it was fun. I figured out how to make it on my own. My teachers are really nice.  I see a lot of flowers outside and they’re so beautiful. I pick them all the time because they’re so pretty and so my mom and aunt got me some vases and I started collecting flowers to put in the vases. These are the ones I have right now.  Last Wednesday I made pretzels with my mom. I asked her, “Why don’t we do this at home?” And she said, “Well, we don’t usually have time on a Wednesday night. We’re rushing around and now we have time do that.” My mom is fun. She lets me do a lot of things. She’s nice, loving and takes care of me.  I miss my dad. He’s not here with me. He’s in NYC and I can only FaceTime chat with him. And it’s hard.
So what do you do when you feel sad? Sometimes I ask my mom to call my dad. Sometimes I don’t really write but draw my feelings. Sometimes I scribble because I’m angry. I draw a sad person because I’m sad. It’s according to my emotions. Sometimes it makes me feel better but sometimes it’s easier to talk to someone about it. It makes me feel better, to have someone pray for me and I feel like I’m embraced in God and that makes me feel better, like I’m loved. |
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September 2020
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