July 2007 - In returning and rest...

In returning and rest...

From the Executive Director, The Rev. Anne S. Howard

When we sit down to dinner at our house, (i.e. when we aren’t at meetings or on travels or grabbing a bite while catching PBS NewsHour or the Daily Show rerun) we pray a table grace that goes like this:

“O God of Peace, in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength. Lift us up we pray to your presence where we might be still and know that you are God.”

This prayer isn’t really a blessing for mealtime, but my husband chose it from the Book of Common Prayer years ago because it speaks of home, of coming home to a place of rest and restoration. It feels like balm when we say the words. It grounds me, and makes me glad and grateful to be in my home, at home.

But now, it makes me think of someplace far away from the comforts of home: it makes me think of our Beatitudes Society summer service trip for Katrina recovery work at Camp Coast Care on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This prayer came into my mind late in the week we spent there, when I sat at a picnic table outside the dorm building, listening to the cardinals begin the day and watching the first light climb pink in the east.

The prayer was a surprise to me because the still-ravaged coast of Mississippi is not a place that speaks of home to me in any comforting way. But it is a place where I learned some new things about what it means to have a home, and what it means to lose that home.

And the Gulf Coast is a place where I discovered a profound sense of home that calls to me now, so that when I pray those words “in returning and rest we shall be saved” I think of how each one of us was “saved” by coming into the presence of the Holy in the people who’d lost their homes and jobs and schools and churches and every semblance of normalcy.

I think of how each one of us was saved and restored and strengthened by our kind and generous hosts at Camp Coast Care who provided us with beds and meals and patient instruction so that we could do a little work.

I think of how each one of us was saved and lifted up by simply working with our hands, by sweating through hot and humid summer days with strangers from across the country who became our friends as the week wore on-- and our differences in theology or politics or anything else became the means of grace, saving grace.

I think of how we discovered in that work The Beloved Community and the One who calls us to witness to the truths that we experienced.

So the words “returning and rest” now speak to me of Camp Coast Care and the years of re-building and truth-telling and witnessing to come. It is my hope that students and Friends of The Beatitudes Society will involve their campuses and their churches in the work and witness that is asked of all of us.

In Christ's Peace,

Anne

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