A Letter from Lindy Feb 9

A Letter from Lindy

The winter before Lanny and I left Orlando, we treated ourselves to a series performed at the smaller theater in the Dr. Phillip’s Center, Orlando’s cousin to DPAC.  The recreation of the 1950s made for TV opera, “Amahl and the Night Visitors” by Gian Carlo Menotti, inspired by Bosh’s “The Adoration of the Magi”, came to mind this week as my focus, since my return from Orlando has been all things Lent. How have I let the season of Epiphany slip so easily through my fingers? I wonder if I am the only one.
 
It’s easy, my former director of ministry, Dr. Stephanie Paulsell, reminded me, in this week’s Christian Century, with the return of work and school after the beginning of the new year. Our airwaves filled with impeachment and caucuses, no wonder we don’t want to stay still and be present, instead frantically looking forward into the coming weeks and months that ultimately gift us with resurrection. We so desperately need God’s hope where we find ourselves today.
 
But Stephanie beckoned me to reconsider the gift of epiphanies, for they open the possibility that we might, and the world might, change. Epiphanies, she remarked, “offer an opportunity to create new ways of living from our fragments of revelation.” In moments that illumine, our experience might just be enlarged, the boundaries we create (or are created around us) might just be made more permeable. Might our existence itself, she wondered, seem to hold more than we imagined?
 
Such glimpsed possibility needs communal practices that extend the shelf life of epiphany, for as I have found—it is fleeting. What ways might we, PIlgrim, extend such visions, in and through our beloved community, so that those who come through our doors seeking, like Amahl, might be gifted with God’s presence in this world?
 
I wonder how we might make epiphanies last?
Pastor Lindy