Blessing as Holy Resistance

This message was emailed to the diocese on Sept. 20, 2024.

On behalf of St. Paul’s Church, Concord, and their Rector, the Rev. Jean Beniste, I want to invite those who may find themselves in the vicinity to attend a Blessing of the Animals on the lawn in front of the church, 21 Centre St., at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 5.

The tradition of blessing animals, including pets and domestic animals of all kinds, has grown in recent years to honor the witness of St. Francis, whose feast day falls on Oct. 4. It has been a way of celebrating God as creator, redeemer, and sustainer of the universe and all that dwell therein. Attributed to Saint Francis is the famous prayer beginning, “Lord, make us instruments of peace.”

Recent days have seen an abhorrent escalation of language against those who have come to our country from Haiti and other distressed nations, to seek a better life, and to share in the pursuit of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” enshrined in our nation’s founding documents. The defaming language has led to threats of violence, school closings, and a climate of fear in Springfield, Ohio and elsewhere. It is important to note that unless we are of Indigenous ancestry, all of us have descended from immigrants seeking the same opportunities, including the freedom to practice our religion and to speak from our deepest spiritual convictions. Jesus himself was a refugee from political violence. No doubt, we have work to do in our nation to address a chaotic and unsafe border, and we hope and pray and vote that those who bear the authority of government will be led to decisions that have thus far woefully eluded them. 

This year the Blessing of Animals takes on a new, even prophetic, meaning as those gathered will join a fellow disciple of Christ in Father Jean—born and raised in Haiti—who will lead us in the blessing of dogs, cats, any other kinds of pets or animals, and all of us who are present. Our gathering of blessing, instead of cursing, can be seen as an act of resistance to a culture that is fomenting violence of thought, speech, and action.  Love is countercultural. The Church when it is most authentic will often run counter to the dominant spirit of the age.

If we ever wonder what kind of Church we are, we get to claim that we have Gospel work to be “instruments of God’s peace” by displaying New Testament hospitality, humility, kindness, and love. Though we may be troubled and anxious, what a blessing it is to be a Christian in this time! To be a disciple of Jesus is to seek the company of those with whom Jesus sought to keep company. This is the understanding of discipleship that is shared broadly by Christians, whether they consider themselves progressive, conservative, or in the middle.

When we bless animals, celebrate God’s good creation, welcome the stranger among us and make them friends (and priests!) among us, we become prophets of God’s heavenly realm of justice, love, and life. Blessing, not uttering taunts or making threats, is the kind of holy resistance that Jesus practiced again and again. What a privilege to be called to this holy work, this St. Francis Day, and always.

How you can help

• If you wish to support the Haitian Community in Springfield, Ohio, the local Episcopal church there suggests making donations to the Haitian Community Help and Support Center.

• Also, we have a close relationship with St. Vincent’s Center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a marvelous and effective Episcopal ministry that teaches and serves disabled children and adults. Donations may be mailed to: St. Vincent's Center, Haiti, P.O. Box 1433, New London, NH 03257

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Reflection of Bishop Hirschfeld After The Events in Butler, Pennsylvania

This message was emailed to the diocese on July 14, 2024.

Only the most cynical among us will be untroubled by the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally. We denounce this violence and pray for the former President, his family, and his supporters. We pray also for the repose of the soul of the bystander who was slain in this attack and any who were injured.

Undoubtedly, our nation can no longer be as confident as we have been that our political processes and institutions are immune from violence and bloodshed. What is being revealed by events like yesterday’s is the fragility of our communities and our neighborhoods—a vulnerability that many nations of the world experience continually.

Sadly, these are age-old realities. We read again from the Gospel for this Sunday—Mark 6:14-29—that the way the world settles its disputes and conflict is habitually by force and savagery, rather than by the means of peace and forbearance. To follow Jesus entails being acutely aware that the way of the world’s power and the Way of Christ’s Kingdom will be in stark contrast to one another.

As I prepare to baptize an infant saint as a new citizen of God’s Realm this morning, I pray that in our part of Christ’s Body, the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire, we will continue to commit ourselves to the Way of Jesus. May we remember how in a time of extreme peril our Savior told his threatened and anxious disciples to sheathe their swords rather than look for retribution or vengeance.

Jesus taught his disciples, and us, to love and pray for our enemies, while seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. May the peace of Christ, a peace that Jesus told us the world cannot give, reign in our hearts and in our churches in the days and weeks to come. May we support each other to be the light this world so longs for and so hopes to see in us.

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Bishop Rob's Address to St. Paul’s School Spring Convocation, March 24, 2024

It’s always an honor for me to be invited to this hallowed space of worship, of music, of song, of embarking on your very full days and of return. Thank you to Rector Giles and Reverend Wydner and the whole chapel staff for this invitation. And I welcome everyone back to Concord from your spring vacation. I hope it was a time of refreshment, rest, and renewal for the final few weeks of the school year. Now that you’re back from vacation, I’m going to ask that you join me as I offer some thoughts about vocation. Vocation, a word that finds its root in the Latin word for “calling.” Though you might already be thinking of your next vacation—just over a couple months away, I’ve been wondering about how we find our respective vocations, our callings, in life.

There was a time when the opposite of a prep school like St Paul’s, or the usual alternative track for young people to follow if they were not going to attend more academically rigorous high school, was what used to be called vocational schools. It seemed then that young people were tracked, from an early age, to go into the trades among which were carpentry, mechanics, plumbing, or HVAC. They could become medical or dental technicians, metalworkers, masons. My classmates who were on that vocational track seemed to be assigned their vocations. Sadly, senselessly, those not being trained in such trades, those more at happy with their homework assignments in math, science, languages, or history, were often encouraged to look down on those who would work in the trades.

Thankfully, I have seen a blurring of the classism that those divisions in education seemed to enforce. Some of the most insightful, erudite, wise—not to mention well-compensated-- people I know, make a living by their handiwork. They practice crafts that combine knowledge, skill, intuition, and the ability to relate to people across differences. My life is filled with interactions with those whose joy in their vocations comes from the exercise of such skills.

One such example is the character of George Pocock, the boatbuilder and philosopher without whom there would be no story behind “The Boys In the Boat.” He appears in the movie, but he is more much central in the book. Just as the success of that underdog 1936 Olympic crew would be impossible without Mr. Pocock, so St. Paul’s rowing would be much less accomplished without Mr. Matt Bailey who practices his craft in the shop at the boathouse of Turkey Pond.

We encounter the teachers, staff, grounds crew, and maintenance crew, food service crew, many of whom are doing their job, quietly, with nobility and dignity every day. It’s always a joy to see Mr. Roger Farwell, the steward of this magnificent space whenever I come here. He and his colleagues on this campus do essential work, work for which I hope they derive enjoyment and even delight that’s beyond just punching the clock to fulfill the hours of the terms of their employment. I hope we notice and thank them for the pursuit of their respective callings.

I am curious about how you will hear your vocation, your calling. Perhaps you already know it in a burning desire to follow in the steps of someone you admire, someone you feel you’d like to emulate. Perhaps you’ve heard someone you know who is quite happy and content with their work say, “Do what you love, and you will never work a day in your life.” I don’t know if I’ve ever trusted that. I love being a Christian priest and bishop, can’t imagine doing anything else, but it is nonetheless work somedays.

Frederick Buechner, the popular theologian of the 20th century, is often cited as describing vocation in this way:

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society, say, or the superego, or self-interest.By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need to do and (b) that the world needs to have done...The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

What is your deep gladness? And what strikes you as the world’s deep hunger? Where do those things meet or intersect for you?

Perhaps you’re just beginning to ask those questions. So what if you get a hint of what your vocation may be by the experience, not of drudgery or tedium, or monotony, but of the opposite of those things: Ecstasy

Ecstasy is an odd word to apply to thinking of vocation. The culture might suggest ecstasy as a selfish state of extreme exhilaration, of incomparable perhaps even bacchanalian delight. It can suggest a kind of madness, a possession of the spirit, a rapt state. Ecstasy is hardly the theme of serious, purpose driven people who sit in these pews, right? We are all after all, residents of New Hampshire. We are known for being anything but ecstatic. No, we are granitic.

It's worth noting that the word ecstasy comes from the Greek, ek-stasis. Ek “out of, from, beyond and stasis, standing, the state of self, or position. Those experiencing ecstasy find themselves outside of themselves, in a rapt state, a kind of self-forgetting. We seldom notice that state, because we are less aware of ourselves when we are in it. Athletes might describe it as being “in the zone.” Artists or those solving a math or physics problem speak of being in a state of flow. Writers, speak of entering an altered state, a “fictive dream.”

As I suggest, probably the opposite of ecstasy is drudgery or tedium: where we keep looking at the watch or the clock, consigned to a minute by minute sighing awareness of the weight of time and effort. We think, all will be so much better well, once we get that one assignment done, or once that final push on the athletic field is behind us. Maybe today, as you’re back from vacation, you’re already thinking, “Just a few more weeks, and it will be summer. Can I last until then?”

More painfully, we are also aware of being mired in the deep conflicts and stresses of our world. We eagerly long for a day when there will be no more tyrants, despots, poverty, sin, brutality, violence, or death. So how can we imagine an ecstatic vocation in the face of these persistent antagonisms?

For decades now I have been working my way through the often dense poetry of W.H. Auden. He has a cycle of poems entitled ‘Horae Canonicae’ composed in the middle years of the last century. The Canonical Hours are the monastic hours that shape a day of prayer in a monastery. The poem set aside for the sixth hour, or noonday, opens this way:

You need not see what someone is doing

to know if it is his vocation,

you have only to watch his eyes:

a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,

a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression,

forgetting themselves in a function...

There should be monuments, there should be odes,

to the nameless heroes who [first got so lost in their vocation]

to the first flaker of flints who forgot his dinner,

the first collector of sea-shells to remain celibate.

Where should we be but for them?

Auden is describing ecstasy, self-forgetting, a kind of rapture in the calling, the pursuit, the energy of God’s heavenly realm seeking to draw us our of ourselves and to send us into the world.

As I was preparing these remarks, I thought I would visit the St Paul’s School website to look at the eyes and faces of so many of you caught up in your vocation. Yes you are called here as members of this community. I saw images of many of you forgetting yourselves in a task: playing a saxophone; threading a soccer or lacrosse ball through a crowded defensive field; on stage in an intricate dance; engaged in animated discussion in a classroom; eyes trained on Mr. White’s choral direction. Nowhere did I see anyone looking at their watch, or at their cell phone trying to escape the current moment by doom scrolling or waiting for an incoming text. The eyes I saw there are, I believe, the same as what Auden describes as those in a vocation... the truest kind of ecstatic self-forgetfulness.

It’s easy to state that your deep gladness in those moments are being fulfilled, but do these things meet the world’s deep hunger? Do we actually need that? How will such things actually dig the world out of our warfare, our environmental degradation, the deadliness of our cultural, political, racial, and economic divisions?

Yes, the world needs persons skilled in diplomacy, in engineering, in the healing arts, prophets and poets, chemists, and physicists and farmers to solve our crises in hunger, water, ecological collapse. We need prudent soldiers and judicious attorneys. We need people who love keeping our streets and cities just, safe, and clean. We need people whose commerce will employ, house, feed, and educate people. We need singers and makers of song.

But undergirding all these vocations is a deeper calling. What the world really needs are those who see the beauty of living, who live with a kind of abiding joy in nourishing healthy relationships, who notice how light filters out of trees. Those who, even if doing work that many may seem as utterly tedious or incomprehensible, will see and share the miracle of living, of sharing this precarious existence on this fragile and magnificent planet. What we need are human beings fully ecstatic, and thus fully alive for each other and our world.

To the extent this place prepares and equips your being so fully alive and ecstatic is the extent to which St. Paul’s School will be worthy to be called a vocational school in the deepest sense of the word.

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Bishop Rob’s Easter Message 2024

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Bishop Rob's Lenten Message

Lent, when observed in the spirit for which it was intended, will always fly in the face of our culture.

We hear repeated and incessant calls to fulfill our appetites, to obey our ever-expanding compulsions to keep up with our neighbors’ attainments, achievements, or acclaim.  What little I saw of the recent Super Bowl was enough to convince me of how much our society—at least a large and popular segment of it—celebrates the “me” over the “we:” a famous player’s sideline abusive and shoving outburst at his own coach; commercials that urge us to “buy like a billionaire” things that will end up in landfills contaminating our water sources; not to mention the hyper-sexualized and gluttonous advertisements that intend to spur our graspingness in order to drive an economy of extraction and consumption.  It’s been noted how our bellicose politics and foreign policy more closely resembles a concussive pro-football strategy than something more reasoned thoughtful, compassionate, and—dare I say—loving?  Even our laudable and necessary efforts to turn from fossil fuels to sources of renewal energy assume that the comfort of our lifestyles will not be lessened or altered. 

Of course, I’m sure I’ll be accused of being a downer, or a moralizer, or a killjoy for casting a critical eye of these examples. In fact, one side of our family is employed by one of the dominant professional football empires of recent times, so it’s not without some dread that I say these things. But while it may sound odd, what I really hope for is a Lent of ecstasy.  Let me try to explain. 

Despite what the Church misguidedly tends to preach, Ash Wednesday and Lent run counter to all the me-first-ism that dominates so much of our attention and imaginations. Lent is not the church saying to you, “now would be a great time for you to shed those pounds for summer beachwear.”  Or, “get rid of those habits that keep you from being your most effective self, as defined by a magazine of the same name: Self.” 

Rather, Ash Wednesday and Lent are the turning points of the year when we look out from ourselves and discover who we are in our relationship with others, especially those who do not comfort us because they reflect our own tastes, race, leanings, learnings, or choices.  This season before Easter is the time to take sabbath rest for ourselves, not so much to restore our batteries to work more efficiently, but to tend and restore our relationships at home and in the wider community, to extend hospitality to strangers, to seek out that person who you know you have injured, or has slighted you, and—if it is safe and healthy to do so—seek a peace, if not in person, then in your heart.  Those practices are scary, aren’t they?  They represent a kind of death to ego, don’t they?  Indeed, the ashes of Lent signal a release of our need to control and to protect what we think is our due or our right. Lent is a time when we, as a whole body of disciples, seek to walk in the shoes of others, even our enemies. 

That’s what the best of our time-honored spiritual heritage invites us to do, to love our enemies, to heal and repair the world, to be so reckless in love so as to wash others’ feet and to allow them to wash ours, to plant new gardens and forests where God’s grace can flourish—even over the ashes of our ancient fears and hatreds and exploitations.  I wish Lent was as easy as giving up sweets or overindulgences.  Instead, it invites us to see not merely ourselves on the Cross, but all of humanity, as at one with another and with God, indeed all of God’s creation. We are invited to journey to the cross so that all of us, all the world that God loves, may rejoice in the power of Christ’s life that overcomes death itself. 

So, I pray for us all to experience a kind of rapture this Lent, which is to say a kind of ecstasy.  The word ecstasy, from the Greek ex-stasis, means a standing outside of oneself.  It suggests a kind of rapturous joy that brings a self-forgetting in love so that we remember that we are baptized into the living Body of Christ. I pray for that ecstasy for us all, even if it’s just for a moment or two, or a day, if not for the whole season ahead of us.  I pray that, by our prayers and by our acts of giving and loving service, we are so filled with God’s presence that we feel little but the desire to be in God’s love. May we know ourselves to be utterly beloved, and in that love forgiven, and thus utterly liberated to forgive and to share what’s been given us. We hope for these things not merely for how they make us feel, good or righteous. Yes, God may indeed bless us with a sense of spiritual contentment and peace, those emotions can certainly be signs of being aligned with God’s desire for us.   May our observance of a Holy Lent be more for the sake of God’s love for the whole world. If in our self-forgetting we have a rapturous season, we will have a Lent to remember.   

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Bishop Rob’s 2023 Christmas Blessing

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Bishop Rob’s 2023 Diocesan Convention Address

Let me begin by telling a brief story about an exchange I had about 20 years ago. Whenever I remember this embarrassing dialogue, it seems to me that God is still working on me, still inviting me into a deeper conversation with Christ. I’ve shared this story with a congregation or two over the past years, so I ask your forbearance if you’re hearing this for a second time, or more.

Once I was invited to meet a bishop to explore the possibility of being called to a new parish in another diocese. Of course, I thought I had a lot to offer-- all the credentials that would make a young enthusiastic priest very attractive to be invited to take on a new challenge. I put on my best suit and starched collar and visited this bishop in his office. I thought we would just get to the business of a job interview—you know—here’s an opening, these are the skills and experience needed, what do you have to match them? But once we sat down, the bishop immediately, without the cushion of any small talk, asked me: So, Rob, what is the Good News for you?

Had I been standing and not sitting, I would have felt my knees buckle. I felt stumped.

I did not have an answer.

Now this was not like an ecclesiastical game show where he was intentionally trying to stump the chump in the suit. He was sincere. He may have been asking for me to share some good news for him because within months he would surprisingly be diagnosed with a terminal illness and die. He may have been eager that morning to hear a young priest share the good news of God becoming human, taking on our condition, emptying himself by becoming weak, imperfect in the flesh, vulnerable to human cruelty, injustice, even death, and then rises to destroy death itself. Years later, when I shared that story with his widow, she told me, “You know, he just wanted to hear someone say something as simple and clear and strong as, “Jesus loves me. This I know because the Bible tells me so.”

I share this with you because it seems to me that the whole church itself is in that bishop’s office. We might be expecting smooth sailing, easy questions to be answered with coffee hour lightness and ease. Instead, we are facing some dire realities to which our God is calling us to some clear, convincing, and bold responses that reflect the unshakeable faith and hope that is in us.

Do we in the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire, feel stumped, speechless, or find ourselves faltering when we are asked, what is the Good News for you?

I think that question is both disruptive and divine. Leading us to reclaim the fervor of our beliefs in these times.

What is the Good News in the times when weather patterns are more fierce and damaging? We experienced the hottest summer on record this year. We are already seeing an increase numbers of what are called “climate refugees”. This is a result, in large part, of a broken relationship with creation. When we see God’s creation as our own, and not God’s, we presume we can have our way with it, extract its resources and exude waste without consequence. God calls us to reject domination over creation and learn a way of being in harmony and right relationship with every creature of our environment as a way of honoring and showing gratitude to our Creator.

What is the good news in this for us? And how are we being called to turn?

These and other trends and phenomena are being contended and debated in a culture of increasing anger and violent rhetoric. Language that has historically opened the way toward actual bloodshed directed at Blacks, Jews, Muslims, the poor, refugees, homosexuals and transgender persons, and those religious groups that seek to support them. The appearance of Christian Nationalism - the coopting of political and even military force in the name of God - is nothing more than a grotesque parroting of the same religious intolerance, mixed with the means of armed violence, that our world deplores in regimes like the Taliban, Hamas, the Third Reich. And lest we feel immune to those same impulses, here in the United States the early leaders of the Episcopal Church, as far north as Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, quoted the Holy Scriptures to defend chattel slavery: the denial of rights of God’s children to take in the pursuit in life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Yes, we have some repairing to do that is more than merely signaling our desire to appear virtuous but to employ our resources, financial, personal, and spiritual to good effect.

Church, what is the Good News for us, now, when our political systems and language are so frazzled and fatigued that they seem not to withstand the new expressions of fear and hatred.

In the past 50 years, the experience of the Episcopal Church, along with that of every mainline denomination of the American Church, has been steadily losing membership and attendance on Sunday mornings. This is not new news. The peak of our numbers was in the mid 1960’s when the nation had an explosion of population. The post World War II-Baby Boom led to just about every town, city, church and synagogue to build new schools, hospitals, add wings for Sunday School and sabbath schools. Since then, the birthrate has declined steadily. A kind of secularism has taken hold, a rise in the belief that meaning of life could be bought by consuming and acquiring more. Distrust in institutions followed terrible heartbreaking and egregious breaches in trust in by churches, political parties, and other institutions.

Cultural incentives to keep Sunday morning a time for church-going evaporated. It was rare for any business to be open on a Sunday. Now much of the American workforce works on Sunday.

What is the good news in these trends for us?

The Good News is this: No matter what, no matter when, we get to be the Body of Christ, alive, vibrant, hopeful. And we are! I am firmly convinced that we are exactly where God wants us to be: in need, perplexed, at the foot of the Cross, needing to be shown again the power of God’s life that is beyond the humiliations, rejections, failures, atrocities and brutalities. This is where, again, and again, the church has learned to reinvent and rediscover and reshape itself to be more and more recreated in the image of Christ. Instead of the stark, barren, bloody and horror of the wasteland that humanity insists on settling for, we can be brought to the beauty of a garden restored with life and the promise of a fresh start. That’s the Good News for me. And who preaches that Good News to me? Who gives me the parables and the words and the images that I so often need to keep going?

You do. You preach and show the Gospel to me and to the world.

Every place I go to, there are people, old and young, who are hungry for community. They want to be seen and nourished spiritually by a Church that cares for them, and where they can express and share their own God-given need to pour out their love for God and neighbor.

Everywhere I go, every Sunday morning, whether in the humble mission in Franklin, or in the glorious choir of Portsmouth; in the woods in Canterbury, on the beach in Rye, or under the biomass plant in Berlin, and every weekday worship service and meeting in between, I meet people who want to love... to build not to tear down...to find the face of Jesus in the face of the one who is in need of love, of care, of community.

Unlike my own early faltering in sharing he good news, I have had the experience of young people coming into my office and I can’t get a word in edgewise for their joyful exuberance in sharing with me the Good News of how God has brought them to love God, to seek and follow Jesus, and be guided by the Holy Spirit.

We are seeing more applications to our School for Ministry for priests and lay preachers. eucharistic visitors, eucharistic ministers, and spiritual directors. Last year, our School for Ministry has graduated its first class of persons, Ed Frost, Michael Reinke, and Steve Rugg who are now serving in parishes and in pastoral roles outside of the parish where leadership was sorely needed. This coming Advent, we’ll be ordaining Fred Chisholm, Aaron Jenkyn, to the priesthood and Joe Rose to the diaconate on the way to the priesthood.

It would be hard to imagine three more different disciples, but if you meet them you will see, oh. These persons have been called to give us hope in a wonderfully complex world. There’s something of the Holy Spirit in them that is obviously moving us. And there are more on the way. In a time when the clergy shortage in the Episcopal Church has hit a moment of crisis, we in New Hampshire seem to be where priests from other parts of the wider church look to come, to apply, and even settle. Good News.

There is something in the hopefulness, courage, faithfulness and tenacity of expansive and radically inclusive love that this church, the people of this convention exhibit, that brings people here to serve and grow in love.

Consider Christ Church, Portsmouth who are doing a new and bold thing in redeveloping their property to provide desperately-needed housing and shelter for women and children at risk.And at Epiphany, Newport, serving school children.

There is a strong pulse of love and life that is at heart of this Church.

It’s a heart that breaks when it sees the brutality committed against God’s children and hears of the horrors of war and terrorism among our siblings in the faith of the God of Abraham. And it is a heart that will pour out generously in compassion.

In the midst of such agony, God is raising us. That is good news.

Not all disruption is divine and not everything that is divine disrupts. But here we are, and will always be, God willing, seeking to restore, renew, and repair the bonds of humanity and creation that God longs for us to cherish and live in. Born out of the hateful and bloody conflict of the protestant reformation our Anglican communion choose to say, we will be both, protestant AND catholic and seek a comprehensiveness and compromise.

Tomorrow we will see a brief presentation of what Bishop Mark Beckwith has called the secular version of the Anglican Communion, and it should be no surprise that the deep fierce but hope-filled conversations between red and blue and left and right are taking place in an Episcopal Church...at St. Andrew’s, New London. This is how we are showing our commitment to our baptismal vows to love our neighbor as ourselves and to uphold the dignity of every human being. Good News.

Finally, consider the apostle Paul, writing from prison, what does he say, Woe? Misery? Calamity and disaster?

No. Then he says, and I say the same: a countercultural word of resistance, or resilience, and above all, hope. If it’s the only word you can say if someone asks you, what is the Good News for you, well, you can do much worse: Rejoice. Rejoice. Again I say, Rejoice.

An Easter Message from the Right Reverend A. Robert Hirschfeld, Bishop of New Hampshire to the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire

There is certain feeling about Easter morning that the gospels strain to describe. St. Matthew says that Mary Magdalene and another Mary are filled with both joy and great fear. In the tender scene described by John the Evangelist, Mary Magdalene seems confused, her eyes clouded in tears, until she hears the risen Jesus speak her name — “Mary” — then immediately in her joy she reaches out to hold Jesus. But He fends her off, saying, “Do not hold on to me.”

 So, fear, terror even, mixed with joy, relief, exhilaration — that’s all part of this morning. There’s this sense of, “Come close, go away. See me, but don’t seek to close me in.” I think we are all, each of us, invited this season of Easter to recall and be aware of our own mixture of fear and joy whenever and wherever God’s love calls us into a new way of being. The gospels tell us, every year, that there is no such thing as a ho-hum, ordinary, or familiar Easter. Today our hearts are again quickened, which is the old word meaning to be made alive again, vibrant, and new.

 Every year, indeed, every day, God makes a raid on death, on hatred, and on sin. And by sin, I mean anything and everything that attempts to draw us away from the love of God, from the love of neighbor, from the love of God’s creation, from the love of ourselves as children of God. The first witnesses of the Resurrection are given indescribable cause to delight and rejoice — after all, death, ridicule, shame, hatred no longer need threaten us, Alleluia!  AND, at the same time, they are also left with an element of longing for even more. Even more.

 Jesus keeps resisting being grabbed or confined, either by a grave, a cross, or our own limiting embrace. Jesus seems to be saying, “Keep looking, and in looking keep finding me” — even in Galilee, that back-country, the place in our own experience from where it is said that nothing good can come.

So, every day, every year, every Easter, every moment, can be a day and a moment of Easter surprise. Christ ever more rises again, showing what the Gospel says: the divine one is in our neighbor, the one who, like Jesus, bears wounds. Even the neighbor whose wounds lead to other wounds. Look for the risen Christ in the hungry, the thirsty, the forgotten, the imprisoned, the sick, the lonely, the ones who are overlooked, the despised and the rejected. Look for Jesus there. Look for joy where you would expect to find nothing but hatred or fear or despair. Look for signs of Earth’s own resilient desire to be reborn when we begin tending it with the tenderness of a good gardener, like the one we meet in John’s Gospel on Easter morning. Look for Jesus the Risen Christ in the person you have may have had a hand in rejecting, even insulting to the point of denying their dignity.

When the first witnesses of the Resurrection realize Jesus is risen, strangely, they don’t get everything they hope for or wish for. They get much more: they get the longing, the quickening of heart, to reach out to Jesus in everyone, in every body, no matter who. 

No wonder there is also some fear involved; the word the gospels use for fear is “phobia”. And God seeks to melt away all our phobias into pure joy and freedom to serve and celebrate again, and again, and again. Every time we think we have pinned down a class of persons or a circle to love, banning all others, God insists to show us how yet another barrier, yet another limit to our love, is abolished on the Cross. On the Cross God’s loving arms extend to all humankind, every language, every race, every gender, and age. And even the Earth itself longs to share in the restoration of all creation on this day. Just notice the role of the Earth and how it plays in the gospels announcing of the destruction of death.

And if that does not strike both terror and joy in our hearts, both confusion and clarity, both fear and amazement, awe and awkwardness, then perhaps our work this Easter morning is simply to pray for God to roll the stone away and out of our hearts, the heart of our church even, and from the heart of this whole broken world which God holds in his wounded and yet His living hands.

“He is not here”, the angels say to us, “for he is risen.” 

Go, seek Him among the living, and come to know Him in the life God longs for you to live. Alleluia.

Bishop Rob's Address to St. Paul’s School Spring Convocation Chapel of St. Peter and St Paul

Welcome back to this campus that hasn’t quite shed all of its icy cloak.  Not only St Paul’s, but all New Hampshire, has been waiting for your great enthusiasms and fervent energies to melt all the vestiges of the winter and to be harbingers of Spring.  Thank you for returning. And thank you Head of School Giles and Chaplain Wydner for the honor of inviting me to return to share a thought or two on the theme of Daring Greatly to Dream, Hope, and Engage.

I wonder how the readings we just heard land in your ears this morning.  Michelle Obama’s call to live without fear and to not be afraid resonates with me, because, well, I know fear. I think about fear a lot.   It occurs to me in preparing these remarks that anyone who makes religion or spirituality their occupation is probably doing so because fear--the facing it, the study of it, the dissolving it, the striving to live free of its constraints—is at the core of all religious teachings, no matter what faith.  Fear is woven deep in the human experience.  Fear of death, of pain, of injury, of losing our loved ones. These probably represent our most obvious or ultimate fears.  For most of the people I know, those things do indeed scare and trouble them, but what really terrifies them to the point of driving them to distraction and stealing them of their joy and happiness is another terror.  It’s the fear of failing, the fear of seeming a fool, a moron. Most of us are afraid of looking silly, unworthy of dignity.  Who wouldn’t avoid being seen wrong or weak?  Or on the receiving end of insult?   The fear of not keeping up our appearance of competence or attractiveness can rob us of our joy, inner peace, and balance. 

In fact, our fear of these things can make us so uncomfortable that we don’t even want to come close with those persons tainted with failure, weakness, or flaws of appearance or character. We fear that by even getting close to shame, it will somehow rub off on us, contaminate, or infect us by association.  I consider it  nothing less than tragic that the great religions of the world, my own definitely included, have been so twisted and distorted so as to endow fear of the other with a kind of power that creates notions of the unclean, outcasts, untouchables, undesirables. Labeling others as inferior, out of our own fear of the unknown, is the first step to oppressing others,  destroying community, and threatening all sense of the holy in the human. That fear is at the root of unimaginable and historic oppression.

Wouldn’t we rather live in the way that Michelle and Theodore describe: with daring, with courage and a freedom that allows one to give it all for the sake of a cause larger than oneself?  But it can’t really happen until we loosed our tight-knuckled grip on reputation, or status.  Freedom and joy is in that loosening.  There’s a lightness to living that way, a lightness of being, a kind of ease with which to move in this world.  I want that, and I admire it in others who have it.   But too often fear ensnares, makes us timid, terrified of making a mistake.  I attribute my own failure to learn a language better than I have or my failure, learn to play a musical instrument to my own fear of making a mistake or sounding foolish, and so there you have it. I so admire those of you who have broken through that barrier and do it every day in order to learn something new, and bring goodness into the world.  As an aside,  I wonder if our nation’s failure to move into a space of more racial harmony and inter-religious, interethnic understanding is, at its base, a fear of making an error or be awkward in a culture of offense that shames in judgement rather than converses with the presumption of mercy and grace. How to dream hope or engage big when too often we find ourselves trapped in feeling pretty small? 

So the theme is daring greatly to dream, hope and engage, and it’s taken me to address fear.  Michelle Obama and Theodore Roosevelt are no slackers. They are among the highest achieving personalities in our nation’s history. They have been revered, admired, emulated, listened to for, well, in Roosevelt’s case, over 100 years. Great people.  People who have faced down fear and timidity.

No doubt there are persons in this Chapel who are headed to those heights. We’ll be reading of your achievements for the benefit of our society in years to come. Who knows who among us that will be?  But that’s not the kind of “boundless promise” or “ triumph of high achievement”  that I’ve come to speak about...at least I don’t think so. But congratulations in advance, anyhow, whoever you are.

Our doorway and portal to great dreaming, hoping, and engaging is not in the attainment of fame or office, rank or status or power or dominance over others.  I more and more believe that it’s in becoming freed from our most debilitating fear which is the fear of shame, of humiliation, of being or even appearing wrong. That’s that’s a fear I’ve had a small measure of success in moderating and being healed from. Mostly it comes from learning to fall, learning to fail, learning to risk being clumsy, even lost. Learning to accept your neighbor, and yourself, with mercy.

One of my favorite characters in recent literature comes not from a book that they assign in my course work in English or Comparative Literature.  It comes from the work of the celebrated Canadian detective novelist Louise Penny.  She writes mostly about a small fictional town in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, called Three Pines.  It contains a small café with good food, an inn, a few artists, and some eccentric characters. Three Pines is the setting of some crimes, usually murders, sometimes even sinister geo-political plots, so you can’t call Three Pines a quaint village.  Anyway, the hero of these novels is a gentleman named Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, a kind of Canadian version of the FBI:  the Montreal Securité.  Gamache is no superhero, really, nothing physically or intellectually outstanding.  He’s just an average fellow who shows up, is curious, kind, faces personal demons, and dilemmas, disappointments.  But there’s a sense of decency about him that fascinates me. He’s not a hardboiled, tough guy or calloused like so many in the detective genre of literature. Book reviewers have pondered if the popularity of Penny’s novels has to do with the deep thirst our society has nowadays for just basic decency, even among broken and flawed human beings, particularly men in our culture. That thirst for decency might also  explains the runaway popularity of Ted Lasso.

Anyway, Gamache always seems to find the culprits, despite making some blunders and mistakes along the way. His trainees and those who surround him sometimes ask him, “Inspector Gamache, how do you keep going?  What gives you hope, and purpose, what keeps you hopeful, despite everything seeing the worst in people? They seem to ask him for the secret recipe for his success, his gentle greatness, if you will.  Nowadays we hear people speak of having a super-power.  And invariably, he answers with four simple sentences:

Are you ready?  For Armand Gamache’s secret to daring greatly to dream, hope and engage?

Here they are:

I was wrong.  I am sorry.  I don’t know. I need help.

Mostly likely, employing these statements won’t make you look good like either Michelle Obama or Theodore Roosevelt in the short run.  They are not glamorous, or particularly brilliant. But what thorny knot in a relationship, or a decision, what roadblock in self-awareness, what political quagmire could not be significantly resolves, melted, lessened and put at ease if more and more of us,  could learn to utter these statements with integrity of character and soul?  “I was wrong. I am sorry, I don’t know. I need help.”  Underneath and behind these sentences is an unmistakable courage, an inner security and strength, a fearlessness. There’s an unspoken and resilient hope and the fierceness with which to engage in relationship--not only with others, but even with the whole Created order that longs to be healed. Imagine humankind saying to the Earth, “We were wrong. We’re sorry. Teach us. We need help.”

Of course, the story I come back to every year at this time is the story of Jesus, who we are told never sinned, never made a mistake, though there are some legal and religious trespasses with which his opponents ensnared him. In the end Jesus is utterly free of fear, not only of agony, pain, even death, but from the debilitating need to keep up Appearances, to look good, right, proper.  The poet W.H. Auden ends a poem about the 20th century pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was martyred by Nazis, Christian Nationalists, in the final days of WWII.  The poem, Friday’s Child, is a meditation on the spiritual freedom that God longs for us all to enjoy and how that freedom is offered on Good Friday. The final stanza read

Meanwhile a silence on the cross

As dead as we shall ever me

Speaks of some total gain or loss

And you and I are free

To guess from that insulted face

Just what Appearances he saves

By publicly suffering 

A death reserved for slaves.

So allow me to bless you and I have come to bless every congregation in New Hampshire--the “Live Free or Die” state):

Live without fear

Your creator has made you holy, has always protected you. And loves you with a power and presence that is stronger than death.

And the blessing of God be among you this day, this Spring term, and forever more.

Testimony in Opposition to Bill HB619-FN

I urge defeat of Bill HB619-FN.

As it stands, the bill: 

·       Bans gender transition healthcare for minors. 

o   As the Association of American Medical Colleges stated in 2021, “Efforts to restrict the provision of gender-affirming health care for transgender individuals will… promote discrimination, and widen already significant health inequities,” and that such efforts “undermine the doctor-patient relationship and the principle that doctors are best equipped to work with patients and their families to arrive at shared decision-making.”

·       Bans affirmation or education related to being transgender or nonbinary in public schools

o   By prohibiting the affirmation of transgender or questioning children by using the name or pronoun that affirms their gender identity, this shows a lack of a basic level of care and respect for who they are, and their feelings of safety in a school setting.

·       Changes the definition of conversion therapy in a way that fails to recognize the coerciveness frequently inherent in conversion therapy

o   Changing the definition of conversion therapy by requiring that it must be against an individual’s clearly expressed will is concerning, as many minors and young adults are coerced into conversion therapy by parents or guardians upon whom they are financially dependent and are not able to clearly and meaningfully state that it is against their will.

Our society is currently in the middle of an animated — and often irrational — debate about definitions of gender identity and sexuality. Though seemingly new to our times, these topics also captivated ancient cultures, including those from which the Jewish and Christian testaments were written.

I speak as a Christian leader who is equally concerned about the mental and physical health of our younger generations. The State, as it should, has a legitimate interest in promoting the emotional and physical safety of New Hampshire’s children and youth. However, while claiming to promote and protect young persons and their families navigating the changing norms of our increasingly sexualized culture, this proposed bill in its sheer broadness does not promote or respect their freedoms.

The current bill, in its wideness of scope, is an overreach of legislative action that serves only to frustrate and criminalize such free conversation and considered discussion rather that promote it. This proposed legislation threatens to make children and their families collateral damage in a damaging fray of politics.

Instead of this broad-reaching bill, what is most needed in these times is a compassionate, considered discussion that includes respected leaders from the medical, psychological, educational, and religious communities, as well as transgender youth and their families.

In the Episcopal Church, our foundational beliefs are represented in our baptismal vows. As Christians we commit to seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves, striving for justice and peace among all people, and respecting the dignity of every human being. We believe that God loves us all – no exceptions. Isn't disregarding and ignoring the dignity of persons who identify as LGBTQIA+ a violation of a sacred trust? Let us meet these transgender youth and their families where they are and embrace them as children of God and of New Hampshire.

Bill HB619-FN contains more heat than light to the considered and respectful conversations now underway in our households, in our houses of worship, in our schools, and in our medical and mental health venues. This is a discussion for those venues, not for the floor of the State House.

I urge defeat of Bill HB619-FN.

Sincerely and Faithfully,
The Rt. Rev. A. Robert Hirschfeld
Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire