Reflections of a Roaming Catholic: Sermons Delivered at St. Alban’S Church, 2008-2014

By Anthony C. E. Quainton

This short collection of essays contains the occasional reflections of a Christian raised in both the Roman and Anglican traditions. They were given at the Tuesday morning Eucharist at St. Albans Episcopal parish in Washington D.C. As part of that gathering, members take turns to share their thoughts on the readings of the day, the significance of the liturgical season, or the challenges of the secular world around us. These reflections do not pretend to be either theologically profound or traditionally orthodox. Rather they are the personal reflections of the author: a self-proclaimed Roaming Catholic, whose familial and spiritual journey has joyfully passed through both the Roman and Anglican traditions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781503518926

Anthony C. E. Quainton

With a Roman Catholic mother and an Anglican father, Anthony Quainton has lived within two branches of Christianity since his earliest years. In his elementary school years he attended both a Catholic parochial school in his native Seattle and an Anglican boarding school in Victoria, BC, Canada. His succeeding education was basically secular but included widespread “roaming.” He went to public high school in Seattle followed by Philips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and the Sherborne School in England. He has degrees from both Princeton University and the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. His marriage in 1958 to Susan, a Presbyterian-cum-Episcopalian, furthered his experience of inter-faith living. His widespread journeying continued when in 1959 he joined the Foreign Service of the United States. After overseas assignments to Australia, Pakistan, India, France, and Nepal, he was named Ambassador to the Central African Republic in 1976, and subsequently served as Ambassador to Nicaragua, Kuwait, and Peru. Positions in the State Department included Director of the Office for Counter-Terrorism, Deputy Inspector-General, Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security, and Director General of the Foreign Service. Retired from the Foreign Service in 1996, he now teaches as Distinguished Diplomat in Residence in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC. A faithful member of the Roman Catholic parish of Annunciation, Mr. Quainton also attends services at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, where at a weekly early-morning Eucharist, the attendees take turns giving homilies, among which are the essays in this book.

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Drum Stalk in Advent

December 9, 2008

See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Mark 1:2-3, NRSV

In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Isaiah 40:3, NRSV

This is the time of year, and this last Sunday in particular, when we are accustomed to hearing the words of Isaiah, spoken in his own words and then quoted by John the Baptist, of a voice crying in the wilderness, calling us to make straight a road through the desert. These are words of preparation, of anticipation, of expectation that One is to come after, who will make all things new and bring us to some new understanding of the reality of the natural world and of our place in it.

What is this wilderness from which John calls? For as twentieth century Americans, contributors to the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy, we understand the wilderness to be a natural environment not significantly modified by human activity. It is a place to be preserved, to be kept in some pristine condition, undefiled by the manifestations of civilization – the campers, the snowmobiles, the tourists, the economic exploiters, the loggers, the hotel keepers, and the like.

Yet John and Isaiah seem to be calling us to leave the wilderness, which in the time of Jesus was a desert, as modern translations probably correctly would have it, and to move in literal and spiritual terms in the direction of some promised land, a land into which the Savior will come. Moses had wandered forty years in the wilderness, before successfully leading his people to the edge of the Promised Land. John is leading us to the edge of a new promised land. Of course, this highway of which Isaiah speaks is not some modern motorway, lacking in stop signs, with elevated speed limits to take us across the desert without even passing through the inhabited world like our own Interstate system. John’s highway is a third-world highway with lots of potholes, with sheep and goats in our way, poorly or confusingly signed but always pointing to one sure destination. Nonetheless, it is a road, a pathway, which somehow leads us to our God.

Only a few short weeks ago, Americans on Thanksgiving Day sang with patriotic fervor those wonderful words of America: O Beautiful for pilgrim feet whose stern impassioned stress/ a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness. But where are those feet taking us? We often talk in the canon of the Roman Catholic Church of the Pilgrim Church on earth. Are we and they the same pilgrims, and what is our destination? What is that freedom to which America calls us and perhaps to which John the Baptist was calling the people of Israel? A freedom in the words of Franklin Roosevelt, a freedom from fear and a freedom from want? A freedom offered to us by the Lord in the fullness of his redemptive power?

But I am still worried about this wilderness. Do we want to preserve it as a place where the world does not intrude? Jesus went into the wilderness and was tempted. When we go into the wilderness – moments of our lives which seem desolate, barren, hopeless – are we tempted perhaps to give up, to say the labor of making the road straight is too much; the mountains are too high; the ravines are too deep; the rough places can never be made smooth? I fear that is too often the case.

Perhaps the wilderness is a place to which we should go, rather than one from which we should flee. Quite recently a student at American University came to me asking for a letter of recommendation. To help me with that task, he gave me the personal statement which he was submitting to the graduate schools to which he was applying. The statement was entitled rather mysteriously Drum Stalk.

His statement was a wilderness story, a story of wilderness survival. He felt it had changed his life. The purpose of the exercise, as he describes it, was to develop an awareness of self and of one’s surroundings. The participants were taken out into a wilderness at night. They were blindfolded, barefooted, disoriented. Somewhere in the wilderness, there was a drummer who was to act as a beacon. He beat out a rhythm, perhaps with stern impassioned stress, calling the stalkers to him. The stalkers were required to move towards him slowly, carefully until eventually they found the drummer in the heart of the wilderness. This student learned that he could make progress if he was careful, did not rush, and tried alternative paths to reach his destination. In a sense that is what we are doing on our own faith journey, groping uncertainly towards the insistent call of God. We often stumble. We bump into trees. Our bare feet step uncertainly on unknown briars and thorns. But we know where we are going. We hear the call, hear the drum.

On reading his letter, I thought that the drummer was in some way like John the Baptist. The voice crying out in the wilderness was not a voice of warning, but a voice of summons. And it occurred to me that Advent is not just about the coming of Christ, as we so often portray it, but of our coming to Him, of our response to the insistent, repeated summons. On Christmas Eve, as we sing Come all ye Faithful, we know that we are called. So too, John is calling us, as he called the people of Israel, to enter into the wilderness, whether our own road be straight or crooked, whether the desert be barren or the forest deep, with the single sure goal of finding Him, the Lord Jesus. Advent is not merely to repeat the refrain O come, O come Emmanuel, waiting in anxious expectation for the coming of the Lord. It is also a period when we can respond in faith to the call in the wilderness, to the drum of the drum stalker, with that personal cry, I come, Lord Jesus, I come.

You Can’t Fly on One Wing

June 30, 2009

A favorite aunt of mine, who passed away several years ago and whom we used to visit for an evening – or midday – gin, would insist when our glasses were nearly empty, You can’t fly on one wing. And we always readily agreed on the necessity of that second tot to complete the occasion. Of course, you can fly on one wing as the patriotic song of 1943 Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer reminds us. But we need help. The song’s refrain perhaps catches the issue best, "With our full crew aboard and our trust in the Lord we’re comin’ in on a wing and a