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Dear saints,
This morning, Monica and I had the opportunity to gather with a small number of folks for a breakfast with Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson. It was an incredible honor to be with her and to get a sense of the person she is behind the rightful acclaim she has in our nation. Apparently, Justice Jackson is a fan of the Longfellow poem, The Ladder of St. Augustine. A stanza in that poem says,
"All common things, each day's events,
That with the hour begin and end,
Our pleasures and our discontents,
Are rounds by which we may ascend."
The sentiment expressed there makes me think of something former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, wrote about holiness: that it is in the everyday things that we learn to be holy, like the posture of the heart we have when we do the dishes. Getting the dishes clean won't change history, but it will form us, just like small and repeated acts of kindness and service form us, or how cutting people off on the freeway or being rude to a cashier can render us malformed.
Justice Jackson has ascended the ladder of the judiciary for many reasons. She is immensely talented and says that she is where she is today because she has been formed by hard work and the power of commitment.
This Sunday, we begin another year of being formed at All Saints'. Jenny McBride and our adult formation parishioner leaders have created a wonderful architecture for us to identify our intention as we ask how we might wish to be formed this year. From small groups to the School of the Spirit, more intimate settings to large gatherings, one-time offerings to multi-year learning cohorts, there is room for you.
This weekend, we also begin our children and youth formation year. We enjoy an incredibly rich and very carefully crafted journey through childhood to adulthood in this place. One of our major changes this year is to dedicate space and teaching to high schoolers so they and middle schoolers can be formed in age-appropriate ways and settings. Sunday nights at 6:00 p.m. remain our time for youth group, but from this year high schoolers will go one way to gather with their peer group and middle schoolers will head the other to the organized chaos of the gym. We will have three distinct high school trips this year and many opportunities for all children and youth to find Christ in community here. And as you've heard me say before: we want you to join that effort—come to the attic on Sunday nights, offer to host a group in your home, chaperone a trip, introduce our children and youth to someone or something in town you think they should know. This can be a ministry that belongs to us all.
Of course, in Winder, GA, this week we see in tragic relief how the efforts we might make in this church, or in our homes, or out in our neighborhoods, to forge a life together and be formed by that life are set within the context of the struggles of our wider world. As we think about our own children, we might also ask what happens in the developmental growth of a child that leads them one day to murder people in their own school? And we might ask how children across this nation are being malformed by the fear and mistrust that surely must be the impacts for many children confronting such events?
We all need places in our lives where we will be formed rightly, places that will prepare us for abundance and joy and somehow also prepare our hearts to face the terrible heartbreak that this world sometimes presents us with. I invite you to be formed with the saints here on this block as we strive to be a vessel of hope and justice in a world ever longing for peace.
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