Dear Friends of St. David’s,
This Sunday will be the fifth Sunday in the season of Eastertide. The season runs from Easter Sunday to Pentecost Sunday – known as the Great Fifty Days. During this time, we hear about Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances to his disciples, Jesus ascending into heaven to be seated next to God, and we deepen our own spiritual practice by looking for signs of the resurrected Christ in and around our lives.
Unless we’re really working for it, it is easy to miss encounters with the resurrected Christ. Encounters, appearances, expressions of resurrection are everywhere, and at the same time, it takes a trained eye, a calm mind, a patient heart, an expectant spirit to see them.
One of the best collection of essays ever written is “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” by Annie Dillard. Speaking about training oneself to expect – and then witness and then practice – resurrection Dillard writes:
“When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always ‘hid’ the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk.
Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.”
The joy of this act, of course, comes not from reveling in the self-appointed godliness of orchestrating a little miracle. It comes, rather, from the unexpected grace of allowing such an unremarkable event to fill the soul with such remarkable delight.
The very act of allowing is something we unlearn as we go through life and forget what it means to be truly awake, truly expectant of renewal, of resurrection. To relearn it, Dillard suggests, is to reclaim our capacity for joy and wonder.
“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand,” Dillard writes, “But — and this is the point — who gets excited by a mere penny? […] It is dire poverty indeed when a man [sic] is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple.”
After all, as Dillard herself has said, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Soon our Eastertide will melt into summer, or as the church calls it, “ordinary time.” I like to think of it as our first opportunity in the church year to move from hearing about resurrection to practicing resurrection. Look for the pennies.
Grace and Peace,
The Rev. Devon Anderson
Interim Rector
Published: April 25, 2024