With one phone call, our preparation time shrank from three weeks to three hours; we called the dog sitter, canceled plans, touched base with family and friends. Then, as his anticipated three-night stay extended, we entered unfamiliar territory, navigating new vocabulary and a host of nurses and doctors, the ground shifting under our feet daily if not hourly. The sociologist Arthur Frank has a term for this kind of disruption and disorientation: narrative wreckage. The present is no longer what the past was supposed to lead up to, and the future is scarcely thinkable.

I’m not unaccustomed to hospitals, neither as a pastor nor as the spouse of a frequent flier. But this longer stay, with its heightened uncertainty and anxiety, has given me a new appreciation for what gets us through difficult times. I could write a book about the lessons of the last 10 days — and I even have a title picked out, thanks to my daughter’s coinage of a word describing my particular circumstances during the pandemic lockdown: “Warrentine.”

So, as a preview of that future bestseller, here are a few thoughts on hospitality, humor, and hope.

The words hospital, hospitality, hospitable, and hospice share the same Latin root, hospes, which means “host.” We practice hospitality when we make someone feel at home. It’s a tall order in an institutional setting, so I appreciated every kindness, large and small, from the medical team, staff, fellow patients, and caregivers, to the person on the phone taking Warren’s lunch order and the employees at Panera and Chick-fil-A where I got a lot of my meals. In one memorable encounter, one of the housekeeping staff arrived while Warren was wheeled out of the room for a test. Taking advantage of the open space, Darrell encouraged me to stay put on the couch finishing Warren’s leftover fruit cup while he mopped the floor. I said I was grateful for the invitation to relax, and Darrell said that creating space for that kind of peace is what he tries to do. We talked about ministry, and the wisdom he learned from his mother and grandmother. Those few moments of connection and meaning restored and fortified me.

Even in the midst of stress and fear, laughter is the best medicine. An ongoing source of amusement during the week was a video monitoring system being piloted on the unit. A remote human “Observer” had a camera trained on Warren in case he needed something when no one else was in the room. If the nursing staff arrived to assist him, the Observer would come onscreen and ask if they needed privacy, and would sometimes check in to make sure Warren was OK. I joked with a friend that he seemed to be listening better to the Observer than to me, and that I was tempted to take it home to encourage ongoing cooperation. Once when I was helping Warren with something, the Observer asked him if he’d rather she call his nurse!

Whether in person, or in emails, texts or phone calls, I treasured every attempt to inject some humor into our circumstances — and the sensitivity to know when seriousness was called for.

And finally, hope is indispensable. Knowing we were surrounded by a network of loved ones, feeling the love and prayers of family, friends, and the faith community, made all the difference. Since I couldn’t make it to church last Sunday, I joined those watching our service on YouTube. Just as our associate rector Joshua Nelson was beginning his sermon, a crew of nurses arrived for another procedure, and I had to pause. “God is present even in the moments we feel weakest,” Josh was saying. “Suffering will be transformed into joy: that’s the good news. Sometimes it’s hard to believe, but we have to hold onto it.”

While I fervently hope my ongoing “Warrentine” doesn’t include another week like this one, I know that more trials lay ahead, for all of us. Another powerful moment of our time in the hospital came during a Zoom book discussion with parishioners. Our room was very close to the helipad, and suddenly we heard the loud whirring sound of a patient arriving for treatment. “That was me in May,” said a woman in our group whom I had visited after she came to the hospital in one of those very helicopters. Being on the receiving end of pastoral care this time has made me acutely aware of how much we all need tending, both in our times of crisis and in the bumps and bruises of daily life. We need each other.

Writing this past week in The Christian Century, Debie Thomas reflects on the “hopes, hungers, losses, and loves” that bring us to our knees. “Whether we use religious language to describe it or not,” she says, “we are starving for coherence, for awe, for connection, for meaning. We are still hungry for spaces, rituals and rhythms that will help us beat despair and recover wonder. We need questions worth pondering and truths worth trusting. We still need containers spacious enough to hold our pain.”

May we be such holding spaces for each other.

The Rev. Lisa Green is rector of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Williamsburg.

That summer, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers had been killed outside his home in Mississippi. Three months later, just one week before our first service, a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls. Exactly three months after our founding, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and 15 months later, Malcolm X — less than a year after his pilgrimage to Mecca, which my friend Ali Akguner wrote about last week in this column. Three years later, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated two months apart.

How did people with enough hope to start a new church welcoming people of all races sustain their faith in a time of unrelenting violence? The high-profile cases I mentioned above were just the tip of the iceberg. Violence can take many forms, as Coretta Scott King noted in a speech on June 19, 1968 — two months after being widowed and two weeks after RFK was killed. “I remind you that starving a child is violence,” she said. “Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her child is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical needs is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence. Even the lack of willpower to help humanity is a sick and sinister form of violence.”

Seeking to be a nonviolent presence in a violent world is no small challenge — and it starts within. As the song says, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” Many of us would never dream of saying to other people the things we say to ourselves when we make a mistake or come up short. My former therapist liked to point out that it would be considered cruel and unusual punishment if a recording of our negative self-talk were played over the loudspeakers in a prison.

So nonviolence starts at home, with cultivating a kind and forgiving response to our own human frailty. Thanks to a workshop I recently attended, I’ve started a (semi-)regular practice of centering prayer, what the handout they gave us calls a way of “being present, in faith and in love, to the Divine dwelling at the center of your being.” Sitting quietly for 20 minutes twice a day, I close my eyes, breathe, and try to rest and renew my spirit. When I start thinking about my to-do list, or replaying a conversation from 10 years ago, or stressing about my next sermon, I gently return to the center with a simple word. Over time, this practice, or one like it from many spiritual traditions, can help calm the violence within.

As we grow kinder toward ourselves, we may find it easier to be kind to others, both family and friends and the strangers we encounter in our daily lives. At St. Martin’s this summer we’re reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s book “An Altar in the World,” with a different spiritual practice each week to help us become more fully human. Last week’s practice was community. “The hardest spiritual work in the world,” Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “is to love the neighbor as the self — to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince, or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.”

We encounter these other humans all the time: fellow drivers, store clerks, neighbors, faces in a crowd, even the people we hear on the radio or see on our screens. “The point,” Taylor writes, “is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery.”

I don’t know if what our prayer book calls “respecting the dignity of every human being” helped the founders of St. Martin’s keep the faith in their turbulent time. But I know that remembering the humanity of others, especially those with whom I disagree most strongly, helps me be a better human as I navigate our own anxious, divisive days. This Sunday we’ll be singing a song I first shared at one of HART Multifaith Thanksgiving services a couple of years ago, one that I’ve returned to many times since in my own struggle to be a peaceful presence in a violent world.

“You gotta put one foot in front of the other,” the song goes, “and lead with love.” May it be so!

The Rev. Lisa Green is rector of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Williamsburg.

In addition to the honor of having our efforts recognized, the award has given me another gift: a broader lens for what HART is about, and what life can be about. For the past six years since our first official meeting, I’ve been more conscious of and focused on HART’s community building aspects: growing friendships among leaders of congregations, offering our annual Multifaith Thanksgiving service and other events, and sharing this weekly column with writers of different religious and spiritual backgrounds. The PBK award helps me see all of this in a wider context — as lifelong learning. Getting to know people from different traditions increases our multifaith literacy, our understanding of their beliefs, practices, holy days and rituals. Like the members of an orchestra or choir, we each bring our own voice to the mix, and — to the extent we can practice mutual respect, compassion and diversity-in-unity — we make music together.

But of course the wealth of religious and spiritual paths in our community and world is just one of the things lifelong learning can encompass. The “Historic” in HART’s name points to another subject ripe for exploration in our area. History, as Paul Giamatti’s character in the movie “The Holdovers” says, “is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.” We can make more sense of the world around us by learning what came before. With The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, William & Mary, our fellow Lifelong Learner award winners mentioned above and many more local organizations and offerings, it’s not difficult to find a speaker, event or tour to get your synapses firing.

But of course learning can happen right at home too — from online courses to public television and radio programs to magazines or newspapers like this one. I love watching documentaries about the Earth and the universe, and I still have a fondness for nature shows since watching Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom” every Sunday night when I was a kid. I also remember weekly visits to the library or bookmobile, and the joy and freedom of picking out any books I wanted, learning about anything that caught my attention. (Note: The Williamsburg Regional Library has summer reading challenges for children, teens and adults starting June 1 — a week from today!)

Learning is a privilege, and it’s also a duty. We live in a time of much misinformation, distortion and outright falsehood. We owe it to ourselves and our neighbors to seek the truth, to make sure we’re getting a balanced diet of news and analysis rather than a curated menu that only reinforces what we already believe. This Memorial Day weekend at St. Martin’s, I’ll be sharing a prayer of thanksgiving for those who gave their lives in the service of our country. It concludes, “Grant that we may not rest until all the people of this land share the benefits of true freedom and gladly accept its disciplines.” One of those disciplines is to be lifelong learners — informed, responsible citizens, learning about our history (all of it), standing up for our neighbors (all of them) and facing our current challenges in a spirit of solidarity, love and hope. E pluribus unum: out of many, one.

And learning is good for the soul, especially at times when we feel discouraged or overwhelmed by life. I’ve long loved this passage from T.H. White’s book “The Once and Future King,” from a conversation between Arthur and his wizard mentor: “The best thing for being sad,” Merlyn says, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie away at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never by tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.”

The Rev. Lisa Green is rector of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Williamsburg.

Tonight is also the culmination of Holy Week, when after remembering in story and ritual Jesus’ Last Supper and crucifixion the last two nights, we’ll gather for the Great Vigil of Easter. “On this most holy night,” we say, “the Church invites her members, dispersed throughout the world, to gather in vigil and prayer.” We’ll kindle a fire in our garden outside and light a special candle, walking behind it into the darkened church for chanted prayers, Bible readings, baptisms and the First Eucharist of Easter.

I’m always grateful for baptisms at the vigil, for the extra joy they bring, and because it gives all of us a chance to renew our own baptismal promises. These include being faithful in study, fellowship, worship and prayer; resisting evil and repenting when we lose our way; and proclaiming the good news by word and example. And then three promises that feel even more challenging: we’re asked to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves; to strive for justice and peace among all people; and to respect the dignity of every human being. All persons, all people, every human being.

Looking for the holy in everyone, loving and serving our neighbors, seeking peace and justice, respecting everyone’s dignity — all this can feel like a tall order, especially at a time in our country and world when the dividing lines between people, between “us” and “them,” can feel insurmountable. But however difficult it is, it’s vital to remember that we are all God’s children. The more we can see our fellow human beings as beloved siblings rather than antagonists or competitors, the more we will be able to find creative solutions to the challenges we all face. “Love your neighbor,” a sign in front of our church reminds us, “who doesn’t look like you, think like you, love like you, speak like you, pray like you, vote like you. Love your neighbor — no exceptions.”

Maybe, even on the eve of Easter after a Lent of Love, it also helps to remember what we say on Ash Wednesday: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It’s not such a bad thing; it says we’re of Earth, just as the word “human” comes from the Latin word “humus,” meaning earth or soil. So we’re also neighbors of the other inhabitants of our planet, and like them, we won’t live forever. “Everything grows,” a favorite song puts it, “everything has a season, ‘til it is gathered to the Father’s fold.” Humility (which comes from the same Latin root) reminds us that while we’re God’s partners in mending the world, it’s not all on us. We’re human, imperfect, limited — and it’s OK. God is God, and we’re not. But our mortality also means that our time on Earth is limited, so we should make the most of it.

We can do that by reaching out in love to our neighbors, in small and large ways. We can say hello and smile at the people whose paths we cross in our daily lives, trying to imagine how the world looks to them. We can take an extra minute to listen to someone, to help them feel a little less alone in the world. And we can notice the struggles of the people around us, who may need a little help, directly or indirectly. We can pay attention to the inequalities and injustices in our society, and use the gifts we have been given to work for change. We can be advocates for our siblings whose lives are harder than they should be.

Last week, I was one of more than 400 religious leaders who wrote to Gov. Glenn Youngkin urging him to reenact the bills to increase Virginia’s minimum wage. If signed, the bills would increase the minimum wage from its current $12 per hour to $13.50 in 2025 and to $15 in 2026. We are Jewish, Muslim, Unitarian and a variety of Christians from around the commonwealth, and we want our neighbors — more than 600,000 Virginians, disproportionately people of color and women — to be lifted out of poverty, to be able to afford housing, food and health care. Ensuring that these hardworking neighbors earn a living wage is one way of respecting their dignity, of loving them as ourselves.

On this most holy night, may that be our prayer and a promise we keep.

The Rev. Lisa Green is rector of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Williamsburg.

Nicole’s first All Together presentation at St. Martin’s in November 2022 was the beginning of what has become a wonderful monthly community gathering in our parish hall, sponsored by this organization that has been bridging racial, ethnic, and cultural lines in our community for almost 30 years.

As a W&M alumna, CW fan and Episcopal priest, I’m intrigued by the complicated threads of education, history and religion weaving together in the story of the oldest building in the country dedicated to the education of Black children. So last Feb. 10, I joined the crowd watching the building being moved to its new home in the historic area, passing by students from Matthew Whaley holding up signs with the names of Bray School students. And I came back that afternoon for the ceremony officially launching its preservation, where Gov. Glenn Youngkin praised what he called “the mighty role the church and the classroom played in the progress toward the goal of all people being equal.”

While that’s true, its opposite is also true. The church and the classroom also played a mighty role in hindering that goal. Bray School students were taught to read the Bible and to accept their place in society, a paradox captured on the lab’s website: “The school’s faith-based curriculum justified slavery; yet their practice of literacy seeded agency.” In other words, the education the students received transformed them and eventually their society in ways far beyond what the Bray School founders intended.

A few days after the building’s move, we talked about this paradox at our Wednesday service at St. Martin’s, keeping the Feb. 15 feast of Thomas Bray, priest and missionary. Bray was a 40-year-old country parson in 1696 when the bishop of London asked him to oversee church work in the colony of Maryland. He eventually founded two Christian educational societies still in operation, 39 libraries and a number of schools. His Williamsburg namesake was among those founded after his death by the associates of Dr. Bray. Some biographies call him an abolitionist, which makes me want to do some more research.

Like many of those remembered among our church’s “lesser feasts and fasts,” Bray was a person of his time, and the complexities of his commemoration are part of a bigger challenge. Can we both unsparingly name and lament the evils of slavery and its legacy and marvel at the strength and creativity of those who, like the Bray School students and the founders of Historic First Baptist Church, lived through it? Can we hold the tension between the worst and best things about our national and religious histories, tolerating the discomfort of both/and?

After all, the Bible itself, and probably all sacred texts, are as full of contradictions as we are. Along with passages that remind us that all human beings are created in God’s image we find stories of how we have judged, demeaned, abused and hurt one another. Sometimes we have to look hard for the seeds of agency, compassion, liberation and peace, but they’re there. And the more we can build our capacity for complexity in our spiritual and cultural lives, the more we will be up to welcoming and celebrating the gifts and stories of all our neighbors.

Parker J. Palmer writes about this invitation in his book, “A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.” “The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.”

This Black History Month, I’m going to take advantage of the many ways our community offers to lean in to both the brokenness and beauty of our shared past, doing my part to prepare for a more just, loving and peaceful future for all of us.

You can learn more about the Bray School at a community event coming up Saturday, Feb. 17, at 11 a.m. in the Lane Auditorium at Bruton Heights Education Center, 301 First St. in Williamsburg. You’ll meet the people involved in the initiative, learn about ongoing discoveries, and find out how you can help shape how we understand and interpret the Williamsburg Bray School. Refreshments will be served and registration is encouraged at go.wm.edu/nsDgtT.

You’re also invited to St. Martin’s for the monthly All Together gathering every fourth Tuesday of the month at 6:30 p.m.; the next meeting is Feb. 27.

The Rev. Lisa Green is rector of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Williamsburg.

One of the voices that has kept me company through these weeks is Sarah Wildman, staff editor and writer for The New York Times, whose 14-year-old daughter, Orli, died this past March from cancer. “Living in loss is heavy,” she wrote last week. “It is made all the more so by a world overflowing with grief, and parental pain. I see myself in all these newly minted members of my terrible club.”

Wildman’s essay, called “The Empty Seat at Our Thanksgiving Table,” spoke to me on many levels: as an auxiliary member of her terrible club (my stepson, Jonathan, died in April 2020), as a pastor accompanying parishioners through the deaths of loved ones and as a person living in that world overflowing with grief. Hearing of countless deaths of fellow human beings from war, violence, illness and natural disasters, especially if we’re also facing personal or communal losses closer to home, can make us feel overwhelmed and despairing. Despite the calendar, giving thanks may be the furthest thing from our minds and hearts.

But Monday night, we gathered again at Walsingham Academy for our sixth annual HART Multifaith Thanksgiving Service. As Historic Area Religions Together, we lamented and hoped, hearing reflections and prayers from Jewish, Unitarian, Christian and Muslim leaders and practicing compassion with a Buddhist meditation. We sang in solidarity, acknowledging what can feel like the best and worst of times, naming what is broken and testifying to the promise of healing and peace. We remembered our dear friend Monsignor Joe Lehman, who died just a few weeks after last year’s service, and we were reminded of God’s love by a choir of beautiful children. And we gave thanks, as one prayer put it, “to the marrow of our bone.”

People often ask me about the emotional toll of presiding at funerals, especially those coming close together as our congregation has recently experienced. Of course, the pain of separation from those we love is real, and tears are a natural — and holy — response. If a loss comes unexpectedly, or violently, or much too soon, shock and trauma can compound the grief. But there’s a reason families often want to call a funeral service a “celebration of life.” Coming together to remember someone who has died helps remind us of the blessing that they lived at all, inspiring gratitude for all the ways they made a difference in our own lives and in the world.

In the church, we have a fancy Greek word for this kind of remembering: anamnesis, which literally means “against amnesia.” It’s stronger, more muscular, than mere reminiscence — it’s more like resistance, refusing to forget. As we remember, we bring back together the moments that have made us who we are. We remember our relationship, defying the distance between the living and the dead. It’s real, but it’s not the only reality. So for all their sadness, funerals can be fortifying, as we give thanks for our fellow humans, both those who have died and those who have come to accompany and support us when we need it most.

“In this time of mass bereavement,” Wildman writes, “I keep wondering if the key to seeing each other’s humanity is in somehow recognizing how universal the terrible ongoing nature of loss is, how human it makes us, how frail, how essential each day is, when none of us has any idea about the next.”

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for those whose lives we’ve been celebrating at St. Martin’s, and for all those who have come through our doors to remember, mourn, pray and practice compassion. I’m grateful for the diversity of religions and spiritual paths in our community, for the friendships we have fostered through HART and for the new ways we may find to learn about and stand up for each other. And I’m grateful that even in the face of loss, we humans can come together to give thanks for our lives and the lives of others, for all that is essential and fragile and holy in our world. Happy Thanksgiving!

The Rev. Lisa Green is rector of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in James City County.

And I sent some love to my friend and colleague Rabbi David Katz of Temple Beth El, a fellow contributor to this column and founder of HART (Historic Area Religions Together).

The next day I received an email from a parishioner whose father was Jewish, expressing his disappointment with the scant attention I paid to the assault on Israel, which he said had affected him more than 9/11. “Couldn’t you have been more forthright and, frankly, more emotional in specifically addressing this orgy of violence against innocents?” he wrote. “I hope you will speak more on this; I think the parish is waiting for it.”

In my soul-searching since, I’m regretting staying in bland generalities rather than naming horrible atrocities committed against fellow humans. I’m regretting not expressing my outrage and grief at the terrorizing, violating, kidnapping and murdering of men, women and children. And I’m wrestling with how to be more aware of and responsive to the feelings and needs of my Jewish neighbors at this traumatic time.

I hope it’s not too late to practice what the psychologist Robert Kegan calls attending, bearing witness to another person’s experience. I heard Kegan speak at a church conference more than 20 years ago, and his words have stayed with me ever since. Instead of offering solutions or advice or reassurance or even consolation to those in pain and distress, he said, we can offer accompaniment, presence, solidarity. When we attend to what our neighbors are going through, we let them know they are not alone.

In an email to our HART colleagues, and in his remarks at Wednesday night’s “Prayer, Song and Solidarity” gathering at the United Jewish Community of the Virginia Peninsula, Rabbi David offered a window into that experience. “For American Jews, an attack on Israelis is an attack on our family and friends,” he wrote. “It is an attack on us, the people of Israel. We are one giant family. We’re all connected; we all feel what happens to each other. My heart and soul, and the hearts and souls of the Jewish people, are under attack. It is overwhelming and upsetting and all-encompassing and very frightening.”

Appreciating the depth of this connection at a tribal, even cellular level, can be a challenge for us well-meaning friends and allies. Our lack of understanding is part of a bigger disconnect we Christians often have both with our Jewish neighbors and with the roots and realities of our own religion. When we make sweeping generalizations about differences between the Old and New Testaments, for example, or caricature first-century religious leaders as legalistic and exclusionary, we’re missing the richness of a sister faith and the complexities of our own.

In her book “The Misunderstood Jew,” which our women’s group read last fall, the New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine explores our intertwined histories and how misunderstandings of Jesus and Judaism continue even now to foster negative stereotypes and feed hate. We can’t allow these misunderstandings to continue. In the words of William Sloane Coffin, “the world is now too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.”

So what can we do? I have three suggestions. First, we can listen. Now is not the time for discussing ideology, theology, history or policy with our Jewish friends and neighbors. Of course, we all have our thoughts and opinions, informed or not, about this heartbreaking war and its context. Those opinions need not and must not prevent us from calling out the inhumanity of these violent acts, and sharing our sorrow. When emotions are raw, it is a time not for debating, but for attending.

“If the politics of this is an issue for you,” Rabbi David wrote, “I invite you to consider the over 1000 innocent lives that were just taken, and to consider that these people are literally my and my people’s cousins. There are 12-14 million of us on the entire planet. Half are in Israel, and at least 1000 were just murdered. Please consider that in your hearts.”

Second, we can make tangible gestures, however small and awkward, expressing concern, deep condolence and solidarity. We can let our Jewish neighbors know that their lives matter to us, and that we have their backs.

“A few people have reached out and said that they wanted to say something to me,” Rabbi David wrote, “but they really weren’t sure what to say. It is significantly meaningful to all Jewish people right now hear from friends, to hear messages of friendship and caring, and to receive offers of support and companionship. Something simple is all we need. Many Jews feel fairly alone at the moment, and anything you can do to connect with us is meaningful. Please reach out.”

And we can pray. Since last weekend, U.S. synagogues have received threats of violence, and there was increased security for services at Temple Beth El and a vigil at William & Mary. “I am concerned for the safety of my people everywhere,” Rabbi David wrote, “and for the safety of my community here (Jewish communities everywhere are on very heightened alert). All of this hurts my heart.”

Please pray for Rabbi David and his congregation, for their friends and relatives in Israel, and for all impacted by the war. Here’s a prayer from Rabbi Rachel Barenblat:

“To our friends and family from the windswept Golan to the sands of the Arava: We hold you in our hearts. We hold your children in our hearts. Our fate is bound up in yours. And to the parents and children from Ramallah to Gaza City who also do not wish for war: We love this land with you. We pray for better with you. And we yearn for peace with you. God, with all the desperation of our hearts we plead: may it be true that peace will yet come.”

The Rev. Lisa Green is rector of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in James City County.

“The Letter” follows the journeys of five people on the front lines of climate change who are invited to the Vatican to meet with the Pope. They were chosen to represent four important voices that he says are too often ignored: the voice of the poor, the voice of indigenous people, the voice of youth and the voice of wildlife. Arouna Kandé, a young Muslim from Senegal, was displaced by drought as a boy to a coastal city now threatened by rising sea levels. Cacique Dada is a leader of Novo Lugar community of the Borarí people in Brazil, whose lands include old-growth forests under siege from logging companies. Ridhima Pandey is a young climate activist from India working to hold governments accountable for protecting children from the dangers of a warming world. And Greg Asner and Robin Martin are marine biologists whose Hawaii Marine Education and Research Center seeks to increase coral reef resilience.

Released last fall, the film’s powerful images could be pulled from today’s top stories: floods, wildfires, overheating oceans, sinking boats full of desperate refugees. The relentless bad news of climate change can overwhelm and numb us, so that it almost starts to feel normal, like business as usual. But as Pope Francis says early in the film, “The ‘becoming used to’ is a terrible illness.”

Our healing begins with the courage to come together across different disciplines and traditions to care for the earth. As a marine biologist said in the film, “Science is a toolkit, but we need more than tools.” Faith communities are vital partners in this work. If anyone knows that creation is a sacred gift worthy of love and protection — that matter matters — it’s those who acknowledge, praise and seek to follow the Creator. Laudato si’ means “praised be,” from St. Francis of Assisi’s famous “Canticle of the Creatures” that names sun, moon, stars, wind and water and the earth itself as our siblings.

There’s not really a separation, after all, between humans and what we often call “the environment.” We are one, physically, we are interconnected, made of the same elements as plants and animals. “What if we are to love our neighbor as ourselves,” the Roman Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson writes, “and the range of neighbors now includes the entire community of life?” Many of us experience a sense of connection with the divine, or something bigger than ourselves, while out in nature, watching a sunset, spending time at the ocean or in a forest. Loving our planet is the foundation of taking steps to protect it and those most vulnerable to its extremes. Together, we can educate ourselves about our own neighborhoods, support local farmers, recycle, conserve energy, advocate for needed legislation. Being “converted to the earth,” Johnson says, means “setting our personal and congregational lives off on a great adventure.”

There is already a robust, powerful interfaith movement proclaiming the sacredness of God’s creation and standing up to protect the web of life. One local expression is Virginia Interfaith Power and Light’s upcoming “Climate in the Pulpits, on the Bimah, in the Minbar.” From Sept. 1 through Nov. 30, faith communities across Virginia are invited to to preach, teach and act to address creation care, climate and environmental justice, exploring how we all can work together for our common home. More information is at www.vaipl.org.

As a start, here’s the prayer for our Earth which concludes Pope Francis’ letter: “All-powerful God, you are present in the whole universe and in the smallest of your creatures. You embrace with your tenderness all that exists. Pour out upon us the power of your love, that we may protect life and beauty. Fill us with peace, that we may live as brothers and sisters, harming no one. O God of the poor, help us to rescue the abandoned and forgotten of this earth, so precious in your eyes. Bring healing to our lives, that we may protect the world and not prey on it, that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction. Touch the hearts of those who look only for gain at the expense of the poor and the earth. Teach us to discover the worth of each thing, to be filled with awe and contemplation, to recognize that we are profoundly united with every creature as we journey towards your infinite light. We thank you for being with us each day. Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle for justice, love and peace.”

More resources and a link to the film can be found at www.theletterfilm.org.

The Rev. Lisa Green is priest-in-charge at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Williamsburg.

I love synchronicities, those times when our inner and outer worlds align to give us a sense of meaning and order in the seemingly random events of our lives. The coach, writer and teacher Sarah Jackson calls these small moments of goodness and beauty “glimmers” that instill peace and evoke joy, even help improve mood and mental health and regulate our nervous systems. “Becoming a glimmer-seeker,” she writes, “will change your brain and life.”

Our multifaith event was a celebration of Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice. We shared a meal, listened to wonderful music from the Sufi Melody Group, and heard Jewish, Muslim and Christian perspectives on the stories of Abraham and his sons Isaac and Ishmael. In another synchronicity, we heard those stories in church the last two Sundays, just as our Muslim cousins were keeping their feast, which culminates in the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the Kaaba in Mecca. Although there are differences in the ways our three traditions see and respond to the stories of Abraham’s sacrifice, as a shared ancestor he provides an opportunity for multifaith dialogue and fellowship.

Rabbi David Katz from Temple Beth El, the founder of HART, pointed out that Abraham, like all the characters in the Jewish scriptures, is flawed — and famous for the wrestling with God that gives the people of Israel their name. Islam Bedir from Rumi Friendship Association spoke of how Abraham (Ibrahim) is held up as a model of righteousness in the Quran, encouraging belief in the one God instead of idols or things of nature. He and his son Ishmael are seen as icons of faithfulness in trusting God, and part of the Hajj commemorates Ishmael’s mother Hajar (Hagar) running back and forth seven times between two hills to find water for her son.I said that Christian tradition also holds Abraham in high esteem. Jesus’ mother Mary sings about God’s “promise of mercy made to Abraham and his children for ever,” and the apostle Paul celebrates his example of righteousness and says, “he is the father of all of us.” Christian writers have also seen a parallel between Abraham’s sacrifice and Jesus’.

But from whatever tradition we come, perhaps the most important message from this challenging story is that God does not want us to sacrifice our children. Human sacrifice was not unknown in Abraham’s time, and so in one sense this story marks the turning away from that practice in human history. Yet in another sense the sacrifice of our children continues every day: children sacrificed to poverty, greed, border disputes, gun violence, war. The poet Wilfred Owen, who died in the First World War, wrote a poem about Abraham and Isaac called “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” It ends with God saying, “Lay not thy hand upon the lad … Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him. But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one.” A question worth pondering is whose lives, whose potential, whose dignity and worth are we still sacrificing today?

Responding to two of this past week’s Supreme Court decisions, Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Michael Curry said this: “All of us — every human child of God — is made in the image of God with infinite value and worth, and that is not decreed by any government. It is decreed by almighty God … I believe deep in my soul that God is always seeking to create a world and a society where all are loved, where justice is done, and where the God-given equality of us all is honored in our relationships, in our social arrangements, and in law . . . (We) create the Beloved Community by facing painful truths from our past, learning from them, and then turning and joining hands together to right wrongs and foster justice and healing. In so doing, we can be and build that community and world where there is truly liberty and justice for all. This is the work of love.”

Let’s look for glimmers of that ongoing work in the world around us. As the Rumi Friendship Association wrote on their Facebook page after our event, “Let’s cherish the spirit of togetherness and continue spreading love and harmony.” Or as Yusuf/Cat Stevens sings, let’s make the world give up, until it leads us to the land of love.

The Rev. Lisa Green is priest-in-charge at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Williamsburg.

If we think of this as Jesus bodily rising into the sky, it’s a strange, even absurd image, hard to get our modern minds around. Seeing this story as a relic of an outdated cosmology, one of my former bishops once quipped that 2,000 years later Jesus would just now be rounding Jupiter. But of course this story isn’t about space travel. It’s about what Christians call the Paschal Mystery, the mystery of Jesus’ dying and rising to new life — a mystery that offers practical wisdom for those of any spiritual path. As my friend and colleague the Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig wrote in this column a few weeks ago, the Easter story of life, death, and rebirth parallels “the near-universal human journey through suffering, resilience and healing.” Though we often skip over it, in liturgy and in life, the Ascension is an important part of the story.

In his book “The Holy Longing,” Ronald Rolheiser says we undergo this mystery of death, resurrection and transformation over and over in our lives. Children grow up and graduate, jobs or relationships come to an end, our bodies change, friends move away, our families, communities and world don’t feel familiar or comfortable anymore. The events of the Easter story can be a template or operating system to help us navigate these changes if we “work the program,” naming our own death-like experiences and claiming the times of resurrection and new birth. We can see the 40 days after Easter Sunday as an image of the time and space we all need to grieve what we have lost and adjust to new realities. And then comes Ascension Day.

In the Gospels, we see Jesus’ disciples move through these stages. Pulled out of their ordinary lives by the Sea of Galilee to follow him, they’ve surely become a close-knit community devoted to their leader and to each other. Jesus had told them what was coming, both plainly and in John’s Gospel, more indirectly (“A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me”). But they probably hadn’t believed that they would see their beloved teacher arrested and crucified, nor that most of them would scatter and go into hiding to avoid a similar fate. So we can only imagine the mixture of grief, confusion, amazement, guilt and joy of Easter morning and the days to follow. Strong emotion appears in many of the post-resurrection stories, from Thomas in the locked room to the disciples on the road to Emmaus. When Mary Magdalene finally recognizes who she thought was the gardener, she understandably hugs him, but Jesus tells her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.”

The second goodbye of Ascension Day was less traumatic, but perhaps no less painful than Good Friday. Jesus needs to return to his Father, and the disciples need to stay and continue his work. This piece of the Paschal Mystery, Rolheiser says, can teach us how to let go of the old and let it bless us. Whether we’ve lost someone we love, moved to a new home or job or just weathered one of the ordinary transitions of life, we can release the past while acknowledging how it has enriched the present and prepared us for the future. Even if we’re letting go of something painful, we can probably tease out a blessing in the ways we’ve grown wiser or stronger on the journey.

In Christian theology, Ascension Day can hold an even deeper blessing. It’s the bookend to the Incarnation, the “becoming flesh” we celebrate at Christmas. Ascension represents Jesus taking our human nature into heaven, where as one hymn puts it, “He reigns, but with a love that shares the troubles of our earthly life; he takes upon his heart the cares, the pain and shame of human strife.” In other words, Ascension means there’s no stark separation between earth and heaven, spiritual and physical, divine and human. It means we’re accompanied, companioned, attended.

Here’s a lovely prayer by Janet Morley that captures the mystery and promise of this season:

“O God, you draw us to search for you; you give us clues to your presence in creation; we find you in each other’s faces, in the challenge and the intimacy of human love. Yet always you elude our grasp; familiar and yet always strange, you both comfort and disturb our lives. We surrender all our images of you, and offer ourselves to your darkness; that you may enable us to become your likeness more than we can imagine or conceive. Amen.”

The Rev. Lisa Green is priest-in-charge at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Williamsburg.