“It is quite an extraordinary thing to be at the right place.” This is the thought that came over me last night as I was driving home from the fist evening of Trinity Institute 2016. Let me explain what I mean, and how I got there.

Perhaps we can start with a little contrast. However have we heard about someone being at the wrong place at the wrong time, when something really bad has happened? It seems we hear that a lot more than we hear about someone being at the right place at the right time.

Yet place is more than just geographic. There is a poem about being at this place, which I can’t recall. It is mixed together with Eucharistic Prayer C, “the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.” It seems like it comes from T.S. Eliot, but I can’t find the quote. Instead, I stumble across the end of Four Quartets

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Perhaps it is from a poem by Denise Levertov instead. It is a digression to think about poets and place, but some of how I got to this place involves poetry.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.

Yesterday, a friend posted about her son saying “yes” repeatedly and contrasting it with her studies in linguistic geography. Her ancestors came from a place that doesn’t say simply yes. They affirm with different, longer phrases. I don’t know the cultural or linguistic reasons for this, but it is something I’ve often echoed. I’ve always been very cautious about saying yes. You never really know what you are being asked to say yes to. If someone asks if I can do something, I usually respond, “It depends, what do you have in mind?”

I usually end up doing what’s been requested, so much so that my boss recently asked me if ‘no’ is ever in my vocabulary. But how do we truly say ‘yes’?

The poem by e.e.cummings comes to mind; “i thank You God for most this amazing”

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

I’ve often seen this in terms of fully saying ‘yes’ to God, something that, at least for me, has always been a challenge. Yet this ‘yes’ is part of being at the right place.

A year ago, I ended up at a conference on poetry at Yale Divinity School. At one moment during a guided meditation, I finally said ‘yes’, with all the joy, fear, and uncertainty that it contains. It was one of those moments of being at the right place.

Years ago, I studied Calvinism, and I often think back to the ‘TULIP’. Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints. I have issues with parts of this, but being at the right place, for me, is tied to ‘Irresistible Grace’.

God’s Grace was irresistible during that guided meditation, and again last night.

It is easy to be caught up in the concerns of the day and miss being at the right place. Last night was a great example. I was watching the livestream with about a dozen people in a large room at The Commons, the meeting space of The Episcopal Church in Connecticut.

I ran into Karin Hamilton, the Canon for Mission Communication & Media. I had worked with her to set up the The Episcopal Church in Connecticut’s first web page, back in the early to mid 90s. We talked a little about that, and my current journey. I met the other folks attending. Several were wearing the collars of priests.

I had wondered if I should bring my laptop, which I did, and I set it up so I could live tweet some of the evening. I love live tweeting. It is a way to take note, be involved, and also share the message. Yet it can also prevent us from being fully present and be part of our defense against being vulnerable, in the moment.

The stream did not work reliably. Having streamed conferences for work, I know what a fiasco this can be, as people sit around nervously waiting for things to get fixed. I tweeted about it and found that others across the country were having same experience and responding in different ways. People shared ideas of trying to fix the problem. Folks at Trinity Church spoke about dealing with their streaming provider to get the problem fixed, and there was humor.

The topic for this year’s Trinity Institute is “Sacred Conversations for Racial Justice”. It started with a church service, and as I listened to the Kyrie loop and repeat in the livestream, I tweeted “I didn't mind the Kyrie repeating. It's the patterns of racism repeating that I find most frustrating.”

Another person tweeted, “I must say, all this skipping around in the Eucharistic Prayer lends some Cubist re-interpretations.” As some mixture of linguist, technologist, exploring the priesthood, that phrase jumped out at me. As we re-imagine The Episcopal Church in twenty-first century, it seems like a digital cubist re-interpretation of church and our relationship to God is called for. I hope to come back to this in later writings.

One person tweeted, “Our plan @CentralLuthMPLS in Minneapolis is to watch the sermon now and then tomorrow watch the keynote during lunch.” I mentioned this where I was and we decided that instead of trying to understand a digital cubist re-interpretation of the keynote, we would join with our brothers and sisters in Minneapolis and watch the on demand version of Bishop Curry’s sermon and then later, ideally, on our own in the morning before Friday’s sessions, try to watch, or at least listen to, the keynote.

I’m glad we did. The digital cubist version of Bishop Curry’s sermon was very interesting, and I’m glad I got to see that, but the on demand uninterrupted stream was amazing, and also deserves at least a blog post of its own.

Afterwards, we held hands and prayed.

God was there, palpable.

We have a lot to do, to fix the broken livestream of racism, where harmful patterns keep repeating. Yet at the same time, a pattern of hope is there, repeating like the Ripples of Hope Robert Kennedy spoke about years ago.

For me, exploring poetry, technology, activism, and vocation, it was the right place, and I repeated to God, “Yes”, whatever that may lead to.