God of the Sparrow 🌱 By Kathy Manis Findley
"Do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows." —Jesus
Poem by Rev. Kathy Manis Findley
September 7, 2024
Appalachee High School
Winder, Georgia, USA
September 4, 2024
WITH DEEPEST SYMPATHY
Killed: Two teen boys, 14-year-old students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo.
Killed: Two teachers, Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie.
Hospitalized: Eight students and one teacher.
Shooter: Age 14, also lost his life that day.
By Rev. Kathy Manis Findley
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Fowler, John. Rising Star, Milky Way, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56313 [retrieved January 6, 2024].
Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milky_Way_-_28_June_2014.jpg.
Isaiah 60:1-6
Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
Lift up your eyes and look around; they all gather together, they come to you; your sons shall come from far away, and your daughters shall be carried on their nurses’ arms. Then you shall see and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and rejoice, because the abundance of the sea shall be brought to you, the wealth of the nations shall come to you.
A multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; all those from Sheba shall come. They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the LORD.
When the Holy Child is born into our hearts there is a rain of stars, a rushing of angels, a blaze of candles, this God Burst into our lives.
— Ann Weems
On this particular day, I am finding it difficult to declare that Epiphany is my favorite day in the Liturgical Calendar. But it is my favorite day of celebration in the Church year! The truth is that this day of Epiphany, 2023 reminds me that today is both a day of shining splendor and a day of shameful scourge. After all, this year Epiphany falls on the sixth day of January, the third anniversary of the day the United States Capitol was violated by a mob of insurrectionists. Thousands of attendees, some armed, walked to the Capitol, with hundreds breaching police perimeters as Congress was beginning the electoral vote count. Among the rioters were leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia groups, who conspired to use violence to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power.
Within 36 hours of the event, five people had died: one was shot by Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, and three died of natural causes, including a police officer. Many people were injured, including 174 police officers. Four officers who responded to the attack died by suicide within seven months.
That day was a disgraceful moment in this nation and beyond, as many countries around the globe lost confidence in America. American citizens also reacted strongly and suddenly questioned our nation’s democracy, the sovereignty of free and fair elections, and the participation in “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.” We were questioning our ethics, our morals, our human decency, our abhorrence for violence, and sadly, our sudden refusal to discern the vast difference between peaceful protest and seditious mutiny.
Can we finish this unpleasant conversation and change our view to the stars, thousands and thousands of stars in the Milky Way galaxy? They are perhaps a sparkling reminder of other sparkling things that are worth remembering—the birth of America’s democracy, the toil of creating the United States Constitution, the Veteran’s Day commemorations year after year, the moving inaugurations of the line of U.S. presidents, America’s many fragile freedoms, the outstanding individuals we become when we give the best of our hearts and spirits to dreams of peace and justice.
And yet, these are earthly accomplishments and events. We must keep looking up into the heavens, listening for the Prophet’s voice saying, “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.”
This is the holy proclamation from the Prophet that Epiphany gives us every January. It is the soulful serendipity of the new year. It is a kind of GodBurst that gives us the energy to keep moving closer to dreams of peace and justice.
I need Epiphany this year. Perhaps you do too. There is far too much darkness surrounding us all—war, violence, abuse, division, rancor, injustice, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, gun violence, illness, drug abuse, homelessness, hopelessness—darkness. I think maybe our Epiphany prayer needs to be a prayer of lament for the part, large or small, that we have played to bring the darkness upon us and our world.
But after lament, we can always look up to see the stars. You know the ones, the ones God placed in the galaxies to brighten our darkest nights and lift our darkest spirits. God set these glittering Stars in the sky to always remind us to look for Epiphanies, and find them when we least expect to. Even if we have only one brief, transcendent, shining moment, we can claim as our own the brilliance of the stars that hover above us in the night sky. Our GodBurst! Your sacred path and mine definitely does take us through dark and frightening places sometimes, but look up! That’s the command I keep saying to myself. Look up! “Arise, shine, for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you!”So look up into the heavens and see the most brilliant, glimmering stars giving light for your journey.
May God make it so. Amen.
Radiant Star of Hope, we lament the darkness of our world.
Forgive us the darkness we ourselves create.
Star of our deepest Hope, you grace us with guidance and mystery,Â
Visit our troubled rest with disturbing dreams,
and our journeys with strange companions.Â
Grace us with the hospitality to open our hearts and homes
to visitors filled with unfamiliar wisdom, bearing profound and unusual gifts.
Guide us on Epiphany’s path and disturb us with Stars, O God,
that the radiance and Spirit working in the world
might gather together all peoples and nations in one communityÂ
to offer you worship and proclaim your everlasting splendor. Amen.
Fowler, John. Milky Way, from Art Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milky_Way_-_28_June_2014.jpg. John Fowler, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons [retrieved January 6, 2024].
I don’t like feeling melancholy. The feeling is just too tentative and unspecific. Trying to get free of melancholia is not an easy feat. You can curse it and yank it around trying to break it. You can throw big rocks at it or try to drown it in a bathtub. But it is so uncatchable. You can’t get your hands around it, and if you do, you can’t hold on to it. It just slips away from you before you know it. You cannot control melancholia. Perhaps you cannot even get consolation from it.
Other states of mind are more responsive to being removed or conquered or broken or even thrown out. Sadness, anger, rage—those you can eventually grab and choke out. Melancholia is enduring and constant, and it can hold you hostage for undetermined amounts of time, making a nest in you and dwelling there without your permission. Relentless, hardy, pervasive, persistent!
Understand this: I am not writing about melancholia as a clinical depressive episode and I’m certainly not trying to scientifically classify melancholia in a range of psychiatric disorders. I simply mean to unravel the threads of the state of being of feeling trapped inside melancholia.
I know there are circumstances that brought me here this week, not the least of which is that I have experienced a full week of a severe stomach virus. And then, there is the constant news reporting of horrible cases of gun violence. In fact, ABC News published this troubling statement about gun violence on May 31, 2022: “374 deaths and 782 injuries over the past week.”
I cannot help but weep about the terrible loss of nineteen children, two teachers, one teacher’s husband, and the perpetrator of the murders in #Uvalde, Texas.
I cannot help but be emotionally moved by the gift a Texas man gave the grieving families. Trey Ganem refused to be paid for the 19 hand-painted caskets. (Picture: SoulShine Industries)
Have these circumstances resulted in my feeling melancholy? I’m not sure. Melancholia might not primarily be situational. Rather, it might be embedded in a person’a psyche and brought to the heart by a gloomy, cold morning in winter, or a long-lived rainstorm, or a gloomy, foggy night without a smidgen of light. Perhaps melancholia can come upon a person by a sad movie, by hearing a hauntingly beautiful requiem, by the melodic strains of birdsong, or the somber sounds of a viola.
Melancholia is rather unexplainable for me. When it takes over my psyche from time to time, I feel multiple emotions. Not just a depression-like sadness, but also a lump-in-the-throat nostalgic feeling. I think that’s what’s going on with me right now. Truthfully, I have found the best description of melancholia in the words of Leo Tolstoy.
There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy. It is a ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness and despair, showing the possibility of consolation.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
It does feel to me like ”a shade between sadness and despair.” Whatever melancholy is, however it comes to me, whatever it feels like and whenever it visits me, I like Tolstoy’s phrase about melancholy ”showing the possibility of consolation.” In my mind, that is the Godsend part of it: that when I feel the emotion “between sadness and despair,” covered in a misty veil of melancholy, God’s holy way is that consolation is always possible. Always!
The Apostle Paul has the last word in the beautiful blessing he wrote to the church in Corinth:
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, 4 who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God. 5 For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ. 6 If we are being afflicted, it is for your consolation and salvation; if we are being consoled, it is for your consolation, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we are also suffering. 7 Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our consolation.
— 2 Corinthians 1:3-7 NRSV
Thanks be to God.
God of the Sparrow 🌱 By Kathy Manis Findley 
