Earlier in this 21st century, my wife and I worked at Baylor University for several years. While we lived in Waco, the Reverend Dr. Charles Treadwell, known and loved as “Father Chuck,” was our family’s rector at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. A few years after we moved away from Texas, Father Chuck was called to St. David’s Episcopal Church in Austin, where he is now their rector. Chuck was and is an extraordinary preacher, so I’m accustomed to hearing a fine homily from him, but this sermon is something special even for him (which is truly saying something). Delivered on February 28, 2021, just after the crushing ice storm and subsequent infrastructure collapse across much of Texas, this sermon moves me in ways I can’t completely articulate. There’s the poetry of the meditation itself, an extended journey into a metaphor that just gets richer as the journey goes on. There’s the evident emotion in Chuck’s voice and delivery, emotion that originates with him but communicates–enacts a kind of communion, in fact–with great effectiveness across the miles and cultures. There’s also, and this I found most surprising, the way in which the medium allowed me to see what he was seeing in a very intense fashion. It felt as if I was seeing with him, standing beside him as we saw the scene together. It was a bit uncanny, and even remembering it here brings that feeling back with surprising power.
As you’ll see when you watch the video (and I do hope you will), the effect would not have been the same if we had been in the room with Father Chuck. The virtual space created by the video actually made me feel closer to the moment than I would have felt if I had been physically co-located with Father Chuck during the sermon. Or at least it seems so to me.
And finally: whatever your own religious beliefs, or if you have no religious beliefs at all, or even perhaps if you feel a strong antipathy to the very idea of religious beliefs, I think you will find some connection here, some warmth and illumination during the very dark days so many of us have walked through during the last … oh, I think I’ve lost track of the extent of the darkness, to tell you the truth. But this sermon helps me keep track of the light.
So in that spirit, I offer you this meditation from Father Chuck. I hope it will be a benefit, and maybe even a blessing, for you.
G, Thanks. I don’t know myself to be someone who watches sermons. I read your words and they and you are a safe harbor for me. My words of reflection are that it’s an honor to hear the words of a person with a broken heart. I can’t know if his heart is broken but I do feel like he speaks for the broken heart of the world. I felt the overtones in his being when he said, “All hell breaks loose,” and “Others before us.” I’m taking an online class through my undergraduate school, Dickinson College, and I’m studying Kabbalah for the first time. The conversation has many parallels with this sermon and it’s salve to my soul to listen across denominations to the good word that the Source, G-d as we write in Judaism, is everywhere.
Thank you, Larry, for that searching and beautiful response. Thank you.