Now I must confess that I know very little about dog training. However, I have thought about the relationship between humans and animals in the Bible and this might be a good starting point in developing a Christian perspective on dog training.

In the beginning, God entrusted the well-being of the animals and plants to humans. We were called to exercise loving and accountable rule over non-human creation. The bad news is that the harmonious and mutually beneficial relationship between humans and animals that God intended was distorted by human disobedience. As a result, human-animal relations in our world are frequently characterized by violence and exploitation.

The good news is that God is in the process of restoring all creation, including the relationship between humans and animals. The prophet Isaiah spoke to the coming of one who would bring an end to the violence and distortion of human and animal relationships.

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.
[Isaiah 11:6-11]

As a Christian, I understand Isaiah's prophesy as being fulfilled in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus is in the process of restoring all things to God and making them new. So what light does this biblical picture shed on the work of training dogs? If I were a Christian dog trainer, such a perspective would help me to see my work as a calling or means of serving God, not simply how I make my living. You see, as a dog trainer, I can share in Jesus' redemptive work of restoring the broken relationship between humans and animals. Every day I call domineering humans to exercise a loving rule over their dogs. I call people to live up to their God-given responsibilities to care for and respect their canine friends.

I know that the most fruitful animal-human relationships are partnerships in which both the human need for companionship and the dog's need for exercise, food and fair treatment are met. I call those who would abdicate their responsibilities to their animals to account and insist that they give their animals the time and attention they deserve. By training dogs, I also call on them to behave in ways that promote safe and productive relations with human beings. I work hard to curb aggressive tendencies in the animals I train.

Moreover, I know that a properly trained dog brings much joy into a person's home. I know that close relationships with pets are good for the mental and physical health of human beings. So in that sense, my work contributes to human happiness and relief from suffering.

I believe that if I were a Christian dog trainer, such a perspective would help me to see that my faith has real meaning and relevance outside of the church walls. It would affirm that I have a part to play in God's unfolding story of redemption. Moreover, that knowledge would make a big difference in how I feel about and actually carry out my work.

This article first appeared in the diocesan newspaper Dialogue, and is reprinted with the author's permission.

I have lost count of the number of times that I have heard this remark. The same goes for its partner, "I can worship God without going to church." Together they might be called The Credo of Lapsed Church-Goers. If you are a priest, listening to this particular credo comes with the territory. But I am sure that clergy are not the only ones to be on the receiving end of such statements. Any Christian is liable to be put on the spot in this way, when it becomes known that she or he regularly attends church.

And how do you respond? How have I responded? In all my 20 years as a priest, this credo nearly always caught me off balance. What is the problem? In my own case, a great deal of the block arises from the merits of the lapsed church-goer's credo. For the claim that it makes is true -- about as self-evidently true, so soon as it is stated, as any claim can be.

Of course one can believe in God, of course one can worship God, without going to church. You and I do so. We don't need to drive or walk to a church once or twice a day in order to read the Scriptures and pray and meditate; we do such worship in our homes and in other places besides churches. Indeed, if someone were able to worship God only when inside a church building on a Sunday morning, we might wonder whether that person has really "got" what Christianity is all about. But if the credo of the lapsed church-goer is true, why should the rest of us bother to attend church at all?

There are moments when it is good for Christians to step back and ponder the purpose of our practice, or rather to boldly go where so few have the inclination or take the time to go and -- horrors! -- do theology. In short, the beginning of planning for a new church year may be a season when it is good to consider why -- why we do what we do Sunday after Sunday, weekday after weekday, season after season, year in and year out.

And what is it that we do? Before, after, and in the course of all the activities that fill a Christian community's life through the year, we do the Holy Eucharist. It has been noted that the frequency of the Eucharist as the principal service on Sunday is a fairly recent development in Anglicanism. How this came about is not my concern here, nor is it my purpose to enter into controversy over whether or not it is a good thing. The fact is, the Eucharist is what most Anglicans do before, after, and in the course of all the other activities that fill their communities' lives through the year.

Nor is it anything less than a true reformation of the church that baptism has come once again to be celebrated as a part of the principal Sunday liturgy, no longer relegated to the duller stretches of Sunday afternoons. Perhaps we are beginning to own -- and own up to -- the significance of a principle that our tradition has always acknowledged, that baptism and the Lord's Supper are the two sacraments that are "generally necessary to salvation." Salvation is as great a work as the making-be of "the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home" -- and why should the church, of all communities, consent to hide its celebration of salvation in a corner?

But what does "salvation" itself mean, and why are the baptismal and eucharistic liturgies "generally necessary" for sharing in whatever it means?

Sacraments as 'things'

First of all I should acknowledge that the Prayer Book Catechism does not speak of the baptismal and eucharistic liturgies as "generally necessary to salvation"; it says only that the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper are such. To speak in these terms, however, is to reduce the two sacraments to the status of things; and in the past theologians have all too often extrapolated from sacraments-as-things to the question of the bare minimum of matter and form required to constitute a valid sacrament-thing. This has led some people to think that it is okay to celebrate the bath of regeneration and rebirth with an eye-dropper, and that all they need in order to confect the body and blood of Christ is to recite the bare words of institution and nothing else. Something is missing here, and it is not simply common sense. It is the failure to recognize that a sacrament is, first and foremost, an event, an action, a doing. To be sure, our tradition (of which the Scriptures are a fundamental element) tells us that we will need certain materials -- water and oil, bread and wine -- and that we will need to include certain formulas when we do the sacraments. But baptism and the Eucharist do not exist in a liturgy-free zone somewhere "out there," from whence they may be plucked and inserted into a liturgical celebration, according to need or desire. We may -- and in the age to come we certainly shall -- have a liturgy without a sacrament, but we cannot have a sacrament without a liturgy. So it is not just the thing we call baptism, and the thing we call the Eucharist, which are "generally necessary to salvation." It is the whole liturgical action of baptizing, and the whole liturgical action of eucharistizing, that are "generally necessary to salvation."

But again, what do we mean by salvation? The Second Letter of Peter, for instance, proclaims that God "had given us ... his precious and very great promises, so that through them you ... may become participants of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4.) Of course, what participation of the triune life of God might actually be, much less "feel like" (if such a phrase is not a theological oxymoron), is not to be had on the cheap. "Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). We walk as yet in a realm of images, in a territory of likenesses, amid shadows of what we shall be. But there are no shadows without light to cast them, and the images and likenesses of our participation in the divine nature really do convey the life that they betoken. That is why we have sacraments; that is also why we have the liturgy.

Yes, of course we can believe in God, of course we can worship God, without going to church. But we cannot share in the life of God without going to church, without sharing in liturgia, in the public and corporate worship of the people of God. For the three-personed God, the Source of all being, the eternal Word made flesh, and the Holy Spirit, seeks to make us partners of a transcendent communion through "the mutual society, help, and comfort" that is our communion with one another in the gathered body of Christ.

This is not so today. Most chaplains, like myself, are volunteers. In Canada, there are only two full-time, paid police chaplains, serving the Edmonton Police Service and the Quebec City Police.

The police chaplain today is a trained professional who works with police in serving the community and attending to the officers and civilians employed by the police force.

Chaplain John Price of the Albuquerque Police, a founding member of the International Conference of Police Chaplains, said in a speech to chaplains: "Response in crisis is the calling of the police chaplain. Response to God's call is his daily fare. He is a person who brings to the lost, the least, the lonely, the love of God. Here is the arena of life, and here, people are battered and beaten and questioning the existence of God.

"Here, by all the Jericho roads, lie all the victims that the frightened and fearful would pass by. Here in the gore and the grime, people cry that God, if he does exist, doesn't care. This is where the chaplain lives."

Just what are some of the responses that a police chaplain must make?

Looking at the Thunder Bay police chaplain's logbook for the past year or so, we get a glimpse into the work both of the police and the chaplain.

The past year (1997) began with three homicides in the first month. The year was less than two weeks old when a double homicide occurred and then as January ended, a third murder took place.

The third murder was that of a 19-year-old gas bar attendant. Blair Aitkens was closing up the Can-Op station when he was shot. He was rushed to hospital and the watch commander called me to go to the intensive care unit.

Blair died almost immediately, but his family wanted their son's organs donated to others in need. I spent many hours with the Aitkens family in the intensive care unit and then at their home. The family did not have a church affiliation and requested that I take the service.

The community was rocked by this tragic event and I found myself ministering not only to the family, but also to Blair's many friends and, to a lesser degree, to the entire community. As it turned out, the same man had committed all three murders, and he subsequently pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with no parole for at least 25 years.

One of the common calls that come to chaplains is to accompany a police officer to make a death notification. When a person dies as a result of a traffic or industrial accident, the police must be the bearers of bad news. It is probably the task that officers dislike most.

There is no easy way to tell someone that a husband, son, father, wife, daughter, or mother has died. People go out the door to their day's work and, unfortunately, there are those who never return. The chaplain accompanies the officers to give this terrible news, not because the chaplain can do it any better, but to try to offer comfort and assistance to the bereaved.

It is the role of the officer to make sure that the family's questions regarding the cause of death are answered. The officer knows the facts of the case. The chaplain is there to help the family contact other family members and the clergy person who may be able to assist the family.

In many cases, the family will ask for a prayer and help right at that time.

The most frequent calls for death notification are after suicides. No two suicides are the same. There was the man who took his life in the police parking lot. Another overdosed on drugs. Others use guns. One young man soaked himself with gasoline and struck a match. Just before Christmas, a young woman hanged herself. Another died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

In many of these cases, be it murder, accidental death, or suicide, the officer who is involved may also need comfort and help in coming to grips with the dark side of his or her profession.

It is not easy to see what happened when someone has shot himself, or after a young boy sets fire to himself. It is not easy to have to go out to a quiet home and tell a family that a son has been murdered. It is not easy to pick up what is left of life at the scene of an accident. And then there are others who need ministry, such as the man who tried to smother the flames on the burning boy.

On 10 evenings in the past year I found myself in the passenger seat of a Thunder Bay Police cruiser. These evenings are called ride-alongs. They give me an opportunity to understand the stresses of life as an on-duty police officer.

Many evenings the calls are routine, but sometimes I find myself ministering to people in their homes as we answer calls. The calls range from breaking and entering to domestic abuse, to a teenager who has trashed a home or apartment. And there are always calls to bars where trouble has erupted.

In some cases, things quiet down when the troublemakers see a priest. In other cases, the chaplain has the job of picking up officers' hats that go flying in the scuffle.

As the year ended, I was called to testify at the coroner's inquest into the death of a young man who had taken his own life, as I had been one of the persons who had negotiated with him.

Listening again to our taped conversations and our pleas with the young victim, the negotiators and I were overcome by our unfortunate failure to convince this young man that he was loved.

There are also pleasant tasks for a chaplain. From time to time officers have asked me to officiate at their weddings. I am also asked to speak to community groups, service clubs and churches regarding police chaplaincy.

There are times when I am called upon for confidential counselling.

It has been my practice to pray with the officers each Thursday morning at briefing before they head out to the streets. Throughout the year, many members of the police service, sworn and civilian, have brought their prayer concerns to me and these are remembered as we gather on Thursdays. I feel that this action has been of benefit to all as we come to think of ourselves as a "police family."

On a sad note, this can also mean comforting officers and their families when loved ones die. Towards the end of the year I spent many hours with a retired officer who was dying of cancer. And, as 1998 began, one of my first duties was to bury that man.

On the last Sunday of September, the annual Police Memorial Service is held on Parliament Hill. As many of our officers never have the opportunity to attend this, I have held a similar service in Thunder Bay for the past six years, going to a different church each year.

At the annual training seminar of the International Conference of Police Chaplains (ICPC) in Duluth, Minnesota, in July, I was elected to the office of first vice-president, having served two years as second vice-president. The ICPC is a worldwide, professional organization of more than 2,000 chaplains in 12 countries. There were more than 350 chaplains in attendance from Canada, the United States, Jamaica, Australia, Great Britain, Zimbabwe and Kenya.

I also attend the annual training seminar of the Canadian Police Chaplains Association in Niagara Falls in October. Much of our instruction has been on problems inherent to gambling casinos. There are several new social and criminal problems that accompany the introduction of a casino to a city or town.

This article is based on my annual report to the Thunder Bay Police Services Board, in which I acknowledged with thanks the patience and understanding of my wife, Marilyn. Her support allows me to spend the volunteer time and effort necessary to make this chaplaincy effective.

This article first appeared in the Algoma Anglican. It is reprinted here with the author's permission.

Having spent only a couple of months as the chaplain, the full measure of the work is not clear in my mind yet. Then again, I have only to speak with my ministry colleague Fr. Monte Peters, the Roman Catholic chaplain at the university since 1970, to get the best possible one-line description of the ministry.

Monte calls the work "intentional loitering."

Being a Christian chaplain in a secular university is a textbook example of being "in the world and not of it." There are no courses in religious studies at UNB, and the opportunities to infiltrate have to be taken with ingenuity and timing, never losing grasp of tact and charity. It is a change to be truly an adjunct who is technically described as "a welcome guest of the university."

That being said, university chaplaincy has been a breath of fresh air for me in many senses. Most contacts are one-on-one. They are initiated by God's grace, and they grow when the chaplain allows that grace to shine through by being an attentive ear, by being a person who will be commended by students and faculty who have turned to him in a time of need or a time when they just wanted a sense that someone cared.

Retirement brings the happy possibility of doing ministry for the love of ministry with the added bonus of more free time for other interests. One can enjoy being part of the institutional church, but one also has the greater freedom of living one’s faith with a new freedom from responsibilities and a great sense of personal choice.

Retirement, for me, is proving to be a marvellous, creative and expansive time.

Last fall, retired bishops of southern Ontario and their spouses met for a day at Renison College in Waterloo. The event provided an opportunity for renewing acquaintances, catching up on personal lives in retirement, sharing stories and concerns, going to Eucharist and having a meal together.

Many of us, while enjoying a release from the administrative responsibilities of episcopal life, missed the social interaction that our more structured lives had now led us to. This day together helped bridge that gap.

It was interesting to learn where we had chosen to live, the type of housing we had procured, the health concerns that some were experiencing and the work and hobbies that were being enjoyed.

It was also an eye-opener to be brought up to date on the multitude of activities open to us despite being officially retired. Some among us, including myself, were assisting in parishes; others were in charge of smaller parishes; some were doing consultative work for the church, for government or other institutions; some were serving on boards of directors and some were doing supply ministries in parishes and for the bishops.

Many of us were conducting retreats, taking workshops and leading missions. Almost all of us, including spouses, were involved in some form of volunteer work. Boredom did not seem to be an issue. Overall, it was my feeling that as a group we found retirement to be a gift, a time of opportunity and continued usefulness within the church and in society.

The group reached consensus that we should meet again and plans are being made for another October gathering using an expanded mailing list.

In personal study and planning for retirement, one piece of advice seemed very helpful: to develop new interests and to expand one’s life horizons. My pre-retirement activities had included motorcycling, bicycling, canoeing, fishing, travelling, walking and writing. These are all still part of my life. The new interests include kite flying, archery and membership in a fitness club gym. New interests highlight the fact that retirement brings the great asset of expanded time in which to enjoy activities of one’s choosing and to remain as healthy as possible.

For myself, the heart of retirement centres on two facets of life, both involving growth: firstly in one’s spiritual development and secondly, in one’s marriage, family and social relationships. Although these areas still don’t just happen — they have to be nourished in our lives — there is at last more time for prayer, meditation and the reading of scriptures and devotional material. I find it quite wonderful that each day provides time for being with God in prayer and meditation. Family and social contacts are an enjoyable larger part of our lives without being in competition with other work responsibilities. Retirement is simply and affirmatively a lively time of new possibilities.

I know that some people find retirement difficult. For that reason I believe that retirement and especially the years just before retirement provide us with an opportunity to sort out our identity and to bring some clarity to our various roles in life. All of us are called to live different roles such as family roles, spousal roles, work and career roles, spiritual, social and leisure roles. For large chunks of our life these roles are often competing with each other, which produces stress.

Retirement preparation and retirement itself brings us a new opportunity to reset our priorities and clarify our roles.

If too much of our identity has been tied up with our career and work roles, then the loss of this at retirement can be devastating or at the very least confusing to our sense of personal worth. Fortunately, as indicated earlier, for bishops our clerical role does continue. For me, this has meant assisting in a parish, conducting retreats, and doing consultation work.

Retirement, therefore, can bring us the time and opportunity to further pursue our ordination in a supportive role to diocese, deanery and parish settings.

We have the time to pursue a teaching, preaching, apostolic ministry within the church. We have time to balance chosen work with our other essential roles as spouses, parents, grandparents, friends. We have time to be centred in our Christian faith by way of prayer, study and to find a balance between an interior and exterior expression of faith.

The good news is that retirement provides more possibilities to be for the sheer joy of being who and what we choose to be. Personally I have found retirement to be a time of continued growth and challenge.

To retire as a bishop is to have time for new adventures in life and in God.

My desire for unity within the Christian family has always been a priority. I grew up in the Lutheran Church and am now an Anglican priest. Since I was a child, I have believed that it wasn’t important what your address was, but rather that you were “at home” with God. How little I knew about the complexities surrounding the truth of that statement.

The subject of interfaith marriages is too personal for me to write solely as a priest, theologian and pastor. My son, an active Anglican, has married a woman from the Sikh faith. Mark has a strong faith in God and has been nurtured with the stories of Jesus and all the glorious rituals of our church. Family loyalty and support has been a priority in our family life. In this context, there was tension, to say the least, as we prayed that my son would some day be acceptable to Sonia’s family; and there was sadness in seeing her living this relationship as a secret that her parents could not share.

But we are one of the fortunate families. Sonia’s family, at the last hour, accepted the wedding and have now fully accepted, and delight in, their relationship with their son-in-law. However, it is not without complications and misunderstandings, and family on both sides have a great deal of learning and growing to do in the years ahead.

The Anglican Church of Canada has, in the last decade, produced guidelines for interfaith marriages. In the preamble of the document, the church recognizes the multicultural and multifaith nature of Canadian society, which will likely increase the number of marriages across faith boundaries.

“Such marriages may bring rich cross-cultural experience to the couple and their families and also contribute positively to the texture of a new and emerging society. On the other hand, they sometimes cause strain between the individuals and their own faith communities, and this strain unchecked may sometimes affect the quality of the relationships themselves.”

FREE CONSENT. The clergy involved in interfaith marriages are asked to give careful consideration to the theology of Christian marriages. The document states:

“A Christian understanding of marriage is rooted in a Christian understanding of humanity. It is therefore better to speak of a ‘Christian understanding of marriage’ rather than of ‘Christian marriage.’ A Christian understanding of marriage includes at least the free consent of a man and a woman to a loving relationship which is lifelong and exclusive. It is therefore open to all, whether or not they are Christian, even though Christian tradition and thought have a larger and richer vision of marriage than this minimal standard.

“However, although marriage as understood by Christians is not open to all, not all necessarily share that understanding. Where an understanding of marriage is in sharp conflict with a Christian understanding of marriage, the marriage of interfaith partners in a Christian setting may not be appropriate.

“In Western Christian theology the ministers of marriage are the couple themselves and this applies to the partners in an interfaith marriage as well as the marriage of two Christians; the church is present at marriage ceremonies to bless and to support.

“(The partners) may bring diverse religious and theological understanding to their marriage. An interfaith marriage involving a Christian should not question or deny the Christian understanding of marriage as it is reflected in such biblical passages as Mark 10: 6–9, Ephesian 5: 25–30 and also in the exhortations in the marriage rites of The Book of Common Prayer and The Book of Alternative Services.”

Pastoral considerations of the clergy for the couple should cover such issues as their commitment to a lifelong union; the mutuality of the roles of men and women in today’s society; the cultural and religious assumptions of each person; their openness to the diversity of cultural and religious festivals and a willingness to participate in the rite of the other partner; their understanding of family life, particularly regarding the nurture, education and faith development of their children; and their willingness to respect what is good and life-giving in the cultural and faith traditions of their extended families.

The Anglican church allows that the marriage rite from The Book of Alternative Services may be adapted with the permission of the diocesan bishop. The rite is both Christian and Anglican but allows for some changes to be made with sensitivity to the faith tradition of the non-Christian partner and his/her family. The following observations require attention:

• the centrality of God is at the heart of the liturgy;
• language referring to God is always included;
• expression of our trinitarian and Christological beliefs are implied in the worship, but may not be specifically named in consideration of the non-Christian partner;
• music, prayers and suitable ritual gestures from the non-Christian tradition may be included;
• a religious leader of another tradition may be invited to participate in the service;
• a reading from the gospels and the Lord’s Prayer are to be used;
• the eucharist is not celebrated at an interfaith marriage;
• the vows and the blessing of the marriage are according to the Anglican rite of marriage.

PASTORAL CARE. It is important for the clergy, in dialogue with the couple, to determine where this marriage can most appropriately be celebrated; in the church, or in a civil ceremony, or in the partner’s faith community. According to the guidelines of the House of Bishops, an Anglican priest may not preside at a marriage ceremony in a domestic or outdoor setting.

The guidelines on interfaith marriage indicate that under certain conditions, Anglican clergy can participate in the marriage rite of another faith community. When clergy are asked to be involved in an interfaith marriage, as presider or faith representative, they bring to the couple a commitment to care pastorally for the couple and to assist them as fully as possible in the nurture of their marriage.

As a priest, I fully recognize the possibility of watering down the rich faith tradition that is my experience. I am not alone in this concern. Seeking the lowest common denominator in any interfaith exchange, be it worship, marriage or living as global neighbours, is to make less of what and who we are created to be. Our Christian doctrines of baptism, forgiveness and atonement – to mention just a few – make for interesting and sometimes frustrating dialogue with brothers and sisters of other faiths.

This should not surprise us. Doctrinal dialogue among Christians can be both interesting and frustrating. Doctrinal issues may never be fully resolved. As I reflect on issues that concerned “early church fathers” and as I now dialogue with “late church mothers,” I am immensely aware that there will always be an expanding edge in our attempts to define our faith.

Questions will continue as we recognize that not all Anglicans are in agreement about interfaith marriage. It is important to all Christians to have ongoing dialogue regarding our understanding or misunderstanding of the universalism of Christ.

I believe that interfaith marriages are not about evangelism but rather about sharing faith experiences and offering pastoral care as the couple seeks to express love with integrity and respect in their relationship with one another and with the Holy Other.

Our different faith traditions have a responsibility, at the very least, to enter into the dialogue regarding interfaith marriages. Church leaders have a significant role to play in modelling the dialogue. I suspect that the greatest potential for understanding, mutual respect and the common nurture of our different faiths exists within the families of the couple. This then necessitates a clear and informed understanding of our own faith. If we believe that we are all part of the family of God, then a healthy starting point exists within the families who experience this opportunity. We will need to share our stories and listen to the stories of others.

Questions will arise over the celebration of holy days and the nurture of faith for children born into an interfaith marriage. Some of us will weep silently as grandchildren are not baptized. Some of us may be blessed by a deeper sense of the gracious and all-powerful presence of the Holy One in our midst.

Today, many of us, clergy and laity, often struggle to define our “picture” of God. It is a detriment to all of humanity that we so often make the picture smaller, out of our fears and our needs for control, rather than enlarging the frame. Once again, as history has proven, our children will lead us into uncharted waters. I pray that we will have the grace and faith to follow, and the wisdom and love to guide them.

As I learned more about the Eastern liturgy, I found out that this part of the service was the prayer of the faithful. The deacon would take his stole between thumb and forefinger and wave it before the iconostasis, in imitation of the seraph before the throne of the Most High. The experience did not convert me to Orthodoxy (as it did some), but it did draw me deeply to the diaconate, and to intercessory prayer.

It was in this orthodox phase of my life that I was introduced to Archbishop Anthony Bloom, who wrote about prayer. I was struck by his observation of how people would heap one need after the other onto God's shoulders just as long as Evensong lasts, then leave the service elevated by a new emotion, as if freed from any further responsibility.

He often told the story of Natalie, which took place in 1919, at the height of the civil war in Russia. A woman with two children was trapped in a city that had fallen to the Red Army. Her husband was a White Army officer, and she had been targeted by the enemy to be shot. Natalie, who had no children, offered to stay behind and take the young mother's place, knowing that she was also taking on her fate.

Natalie interceded for the young mother in the deepest sense, by stepping into her shoes, and accepting certain death.

I learned from this about the solemnity and the cost of intercessory prayer. I began to see it as an expression of service or diakonia, when we willingly set aside our own agenda and take on the needs of others. Of course, none of us can act directly on everything we pray for, nor can we assume that our prayer alone will change a situation. At the heart of all prayer, there is a mystery—why do some for whom we pray die, while others heal? We do not know what strange alchemy makes some things happen and others not.

In public intercession, there is a temptation to say too much. Often, I find the prayers of the people are lengthy, florid outpourings or self-righteous sermons, giving God—or the congregation -- exact instructions for handling every situation. Good intercessions invite the faithful to pray to God and act themselves for the people and things that are named.

Another deacon, Ormonde Plater, offers these guidelines for leading the prayers of the people:

Pray for the church, the world, the nation, the community, the suffering, and the dead. If we cover only a few categories, or pray for the same ones every Sunday, we risk losing perspective, becoming too inward looking, or seeing only what's out there and not what's on our own doorstep.

Make the prayers general, using restraint with specific names and local concerns. If specific needs and intentions are announced before the biddings, this allows people to centre themselves and to add their own intentions aloud or in silence.

Remember that intercessions are primarily prayers for relieving needs, fulfilling hopes, and remedying concerns. Prayers of praise, or thanksgivings for birthdays, anniversaries, or accomplishments have their place in other parts of the service or gathering.

Use short, easy to follow biddings such as For [person or concerns] or That [intention,] or a combination: For [person or concerns], that [intention,] ending with a cue such as let us pray to the Lord.

Use responses that are brief, uniform, and easy to remember.

The role of the leader is to address the people who do the actual praying. Leave them space to do that! When the leader reminds people of topics and asks them to pray, he or she is acting as a herald (a diaconal function), and the people pray the intercessions through silence or responses.

Intercession—stepping into the shoes of others—is part of the life work, literally, the liturgy, of all baptized Christians. It is corporate prayer, offered for the church, the world, and the nations, not just private bedtime prayers for friends and family. The Anglican tradition may not be to chant deeply, wave stoles, or bow before an iconostasis. And, God willing, we may never be called to take the place of someone marked for execution. Yet when we lead or participate in the Prayers of the People, we can become more deeply aware of the solemnity and cost of what we ask, and of Whom we are asking it. And we can leave the service, elevated by a new courage to change the world and be changed ourselves, into what is possible and desirable for God.

There is a story that Beethoven once played a newly composed sonata for a friend. When he had finished, the friend asked, What does it mean? Beethoven sat down at the piano and played the sonata all over again.

I feel something of Beethoven's implied disapproval as I stand here trying to talk about hymns. Talking implies reason, logic, thinking—everything we associate with the left side of the brain. Although they include words, hymns are firmly anchored by music to the affective and intuitive dimensions of experience, to the realm of the pre-rational. I don't mean that they are necessarily irrational, although some of them certainly are, but pre-rational, belonging to that shadowy but vital realm of thought that stands behind our logical constructions. Hymns cannot exist without music—can you imagine a liturgy in which we solemnly recited five hymn texts in spoken voice? Nor do they succeed without metaphor, alliteration, rhythm and all the apparatus of language we call poetry. As constructs of music and poetry, whether profoundly simple or highly exalted, they defy the kind of analysis we imply by the question: What does it mean?

Hymns are actually ritual events. They do not really exist in hymn books. They do not consist of paper and ink. Hymn books are only containers for the tradition. Hymns exist when people sing, whether a congregation on Sunday morning, a solitary performer in a Sikh Gurdwara, or myself alone in the shower. A hymn is there for as long as the singing goes on, providing like all rituals do, a bridge of passage from one moment to another, a bridge of passage that is illuminated by the combination of words and poetry to give expression to the significance of the moment. The passage of the moment may be only from one part of the liturgy to another, but it may also be from one state of mind to another—from cynicism to rejoicing, from indifference to repentance, from forgetting to remembering (as on Remembrance Day) from raw grief to healing lament. Hymns grasp the moment and open the way to opportunity beyond it.

Some of the oldest collections of hymns are from the Indian subcontinent. They are called the Vedas. Some of them are hymns of praise, but others are actually ritual formulas to be recited by a priest who is offering sacrifice. Some of the psalms of our tradition are not dissimilar. The earliest description of Christian worship by a non-Christian, the letter of Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan, may imply a parallel understanding of the Eucharist prayer. He said it was the custom of Christians to gather before dawn on a fixed day and to sing a hymn, a carmen, to Christ, as if to a god. Whatever Pliny had been able to discover about the fabric of our worship, the ritual nature of hymns was secured at an early date in our history. Phos hilaron, the hymn to Christ at light, was sung to mark the passage from day to night, and even some of the hymns in the New Testament may have a similar use.

Of course our oldest hymn book is the psalter, which came to us with the rest of the Jewish Bible. If one sifts out some of the wisdom and history psalms, the rest of the collection is about two-thirds praise and one-third lament. I haven't done a detailed count in Common Praise, but I suspect our collection is similar, that roughly two-thirds of our hymns are praise and thanksgiving and one-third are expressions of longing and lament. I think this is a healthy pattern. We are most ourselves, most open to grace when we go beyond ourselves in praise and thanksgiving. This is fundamental to our faith tradition. Our primary act of worship is called Thanksgiving albeit in Greek. On the other hand, there is much to lament—our personal failures, our social hardness of heart, our destruction of the environment, the homelessness of people in our streets and parks. It is appropriate that our hymns capture this dark side of our human condition as well. However, it is also appropriate that, like the psalms of lament, they bend back to praise. The purpose of lament is not self-flagellation but repentance and conversion, and the purpose of conversion is transfiguration. This is one of the passages our hymns invoke.

One of the greatest strengths of hymns as we know them is that they are popular—they belong to the people. When Guru Nanak wanted to promote a religious synthesis beyond the conflicts of Hinduism and Islam and beyond the isolating violence of caste, he led people out into the forest to sit in a circle and sing hymns.

Singing hymns on the eve of the Sabbath is an important feature of Hasidic spirituality. Hymns mobilized the Wesleyan revival, providing people with gut-level access to theology. This popular dimension of hymnody has a dynamic two-way aspect. Hymns are not just an instrument to put ideas into the heads of the unsophisticated. They are a way in which the church as a living community can try out new ideas, new trends and at a popular level.

For example, prayer for the dead almost vanished among Anglicans after the Reformation because of the excesses and superstition of medieval piety. However, after the First World War many people felt a need to express in prayer their continuing love for those they had lost. Long before it would have been possible to insert prayers for those who had died in any Prayer Book, they were tried out, almost experimentally, in hymn collections. I believe it was the presence of such hymns in our 1938 Hymn Book that made it possible to include modest prayers for the dead in our 1962 Prayer Book.

Similarly, Canadian Anglicans were content to sing And now, O Father, mindful of the love, with its setting forth of the sacrifice of Christ, long before they could have contemplated similar words, what we call amamnesis in their Eucharist prayer. It is in this spirit that Common Praise reflects a broader and more inclusive use of images of God, a sharpened sense of justice and responsibility, a deeper commitment to the equality of the human family, a recognition that the kingdom is truly already even if not yet.

It is when we mention justice and responsibility that we have to remember that hymns, however sensitive, are not ends in themselves. The warning of the prophet Amos must not be forgotten. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harp. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an overflowing stream.

Paul said much the same thing when he told the Corinthians that the tongues of mortals and angels without love are only noisy gongs and clanging cymbals—whatever the marks of good hymnody. Hymnody that masks our vocation to kindness, compassion and responsibility is an abomination, or what the liberation theologians would call an ideology. We may, if we are careful, take Amos' stern words as hyperbole, so long as we take them seriously.

In this vein, I note that probably the most poignant reference to a hymn in the whole Bible is a little verse that appears almost unnoticed in Matthew's and Mark's account of the last supper. When they had sung the hymn, it reads, they went out to the Mount of Olives. The hymn in question is presumably the Hallel, Psalms 113–118, which still concludes the Passover meal. It is deeply moving to realize that we probably have the text of the hymn that Jesus and his disciples sang immediately before he went out to the desperation of the garden, to betrayal, to Jim Crow trial and to death. That hymn is full of praise, and trust and blessing.

The dead do not praise the Lord, nor all those who go down into silence; but we will bless the Lord, from this time forth and for evermore.... The Lord watches over the innocent; I was brought very low and he helped me.... How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord.... I will give thanks to you, for you answered me and have become my salvation.... Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; we bless you from the house of the Lord.... Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his mercy endures forever.

Between the fellowship of that last meal, itself an activity so characteristic of Jesus and his ministry, and his final engagement with the oppressive powers of religion and state, there is this final gesture and ritual of passage, this pause between resolution and action, which gives focus and definition to all that stands before and after. Ultimately, that is why we sing hymns and, to maintain the living tradition, why we publish hymn books.

Intention, solitude, epiphany, communion. For me, words of prayer, unlike words that barrage or barricade, are the conscious tips of hidden depths; imprints marking a path towards the dearest freshness deep down things; thresholds crossed to contemplate the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ: O gladsome Light, O Grace of God the Father's face ... joyful in your appearing.

Prayer can refer to intensely private and idiosyncratic phenomena: discrete textured moments, fingered like the beads of a rosary. But at the same time prayer has a public corporate dimension that circles like a tide around the great wide world; a labyrinth walked by an everflowing stream of pilgrims.

At dusk, en route back to Jerusalem from a day in Gaza, we stopped for prayers and a simple meal with the Community of the Beatitudes in the Church of the Resurrection, a 12th-century crusader church in the Palestinian village of Abu Gosh. It was there that the crusaders used to commemorate the events of Luke 24: the disciples' recognition of the Risen One in the breaking of bread.

As we approached the doorway to enter within the thick walls, a shofar sounded in the distance, announcing the beginning of Sabbath. Immediately, there was the cry of the muezzin's call to prayer from the minaret, and then the church bells pealed for vespers. That braid of public piety, the well-worn, woven fabric of three cultures, has provided a common carpet upon which the faithful may kneel. In a language not my own, the psalms were sung: a timeless bridge of centuries' ceaseless crossings. Afterwards we descended to the crypt and found a Roman cistern, and an ancient spring from earliest days, earliest scriptures: source of life in a desert land. I knelt to fill my earthenware pot, small vessel of circumstance.

Unexpected epiphanies such as these, sustain us and kindle our hearts as we struggle to develop contentment and gratitude, justice and compassion in an environment that may be hostile to the spiritual, and lacking in respect for the integrity of persons and creation. Such visitations are not as infrequent as we might suppose. They are from before time and forever, in forms as diverse as the peoples of the earth. I remember an Anglican group's startled joy when, having gathered by the lake with their aboriginal leader just after dawn, to offer tobacco and traditional prayers, an eagle came and circled above.

Sometimes, we are reluctant to validate our intimations of communion, our visualisations of wholeness, as prayer. Perhaps this is because we think of prayer as being more formulaic in nature, or perhaps because we judge ourselves lacking some degree of competence to approach the sacred.

In her introduction to Every Eye Beholds You, A World Treasury of Prayer, Karen Armstrong writes in relation to such self-judgements:

We tend to equate faith with believing certain things about God or the sacred... Belief, that is adopting the correct ideas about the divine, is seen as the first and essential step of the spiritual journey. But the history of religion makes it clear that to expect to have faith before embarking on the disciplines of the spiritual life is like putting the cart before the horse. In all the great traditions, prophets, sages, and mystics spend very little time telling their disciples what they ought to believe. Faith meant trust... Faith was thus a carefully cultivated conviction that, despite all the tragic and dispiriting evidence to the contrary, our lives did have some ultimate meaning and value. Faith was thus the fruit of spirituality, not something that you had to have at the start of your quest.

I remember that in my pre-ordination interview with Archbishop Douglas Hambidge, I identified my chief concern about priesthood as being my difficulty with praying. The Archbishop wisely advised me to pray with others.

To pray with others, I've discovered since, extends beyond prayer circles. Whether we're at home alone or in church, we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses—the communion of saints: a thousand echoes from the past ... a carnival of faiths and cultures... a crowd that clamours pain and anger ... a throng of future shapes and shadows ... a rainbow host of milling children, God's varied image from all lands.

Some, in Thomas Craughwell's words, find comfort in repeating ancient prayers: their timeless formulas are a bridge between one who recites the prayer today and all those faithful souls throughout the centuries who prayed in the exact same words.

My own comfort continues to be in playing the hymns of the church, old and new, our common praise, on my grandfather's piano. My earliest church memory, as a little girl, is of the congregation singing The Lord's My Shepherd and my responding to the final and in God's house for evermore my dwelling place shall be with a great Amen—Yes! that is what I want!—welling up inside of me.

Our own prayer, whatever its nature, has a place within the prayer of the whole church.

The corporate dimensions of the church's prayer—the divine office and liturgy, the reading of scripture, the singing of the songs of salvation—are not only filled themselves with the grace of presence. The beat of their repetitions, the procession of their seasons resonate in our lives. The rhythms of lament and praise, thanksgiving and supplication, comfort and challenge, expectation and fulfilment, stay with us to shape our personal perceptions and attitudes, our work and encounters, into prayer.

There is a childlike suspension of disbelief that is called for by prayer, a curiosity, a holding ourselves in readiness to be surprised and astounded, as much by the opaque words of prayer or scripture suddenly become transparent, as by the loveliness that blossoms within the predictable daily round. Karen Armstrong's words again ring true for me:

The sheer busyness of our lives often leaves little time for contemplation. The world can become familiar to us. Prayers help us to see what is really there: a mystery that cannot be simplistically defined but that becomes apparent when we learn how to strip away the veil of familiarity that obscures it. Prayers help to hold us in the attitude of wonder, to put ourselves in tune with the fundamental laws of existence. By learning to see the sacred in the world around us, we will approach it with reverence. The world becomes what Muslims call an Èayah' (a sign) of God, not something to be exploited or greedily ransacked for our gain.

The earth, its people and other creatures, its trees and soil, waters, and air, its nations, communities and cultures are like the bush burning yet not being consumed. They call us to attend to the voice of the living God, to lift up our hearts as an offering, and then be willing to go to the place where God sends us, the place that God has shown us.

To notice the ordinary characters and incidents when they present themselves involves a self-emptying willingness to entrust what we see to God and simply pray: What does it mean to be your disciple now?

To enable such a prayer to permeate our life and transfigure our mundane routines, The Rule of the Society of St. John the Evangelist invites us to resist the tendency to restrict prayer to set times ... to aim at eucharistic living that is responsive at all times and in all places to the divine presence ... to seek the gift of attentiveness by which we discern signs of God's presence and action in creation, in other people, and in the fabric of ordinary existence ... to surrender fretfulness and anxiety in order to be available to God in the present moment.

For it is in any given moment that the small, the ordinary may be transfigured and become the icon, kissed by many before us, through which we too are caught up in communion in God.

Living God,
in Christ you make all things new.
Transform the poverty of our nature
by the riches of your grace,
and in the renewal of our lives
make known your glory.