Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner

A few weeks after finishing The Kite Runner, I still get chills remebering one line: "For you, a thousand times over." It is spoken by the narrator, Amir, to his newly adopted son at the end of the novel. The two of them have just won an Afghan style kite tournament by cutting the string of the rival kite and setting it adrift. "Do you want me to run that kite for you?" Amir asks his son. "Running" a kite means retrieving it as a trophy. The son nods. That's when Amir says these words to his son--"For you, a thousand times over"

When he was a boy, Amir had often heard these words from Hassan, his childhood friend and the son of his father's Hazara servant. Hassan would say them to Amir when performing one or another menial task for him--or when Amir would ask him to run a kite: "For you, a thousand times over." Even despite the two boys' seemingly vast differences of class and race, Hassan's words carried enormous love and loyalty.

But this story is about more than Hassan's devotion to Amir. It is also about Amir's cruel betrayal of Hassan. The guilt from that betrayal haunts Amir--comes to govern his life, really--and is finally purged only at great cost in one explosive scene.

Eventually, Hassan is murdered by Taliban thugs, Amir adopts his son, bringing him home to California where he shows him the same love he himself had received from Hassan. "For you, a thousand times over," Amir says to the boy just before running the kite, then adds:

I ran, a grown man running with swarms of screaming children. But I didn't care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the Valley of Panjsher on my lips.
I ran.

Amir's memories of his childhood friend have taught him how to love. Amir is now the kite runner. This story of redemption makes me want to love more fully as well--the highest praise I can give any book.

Our Parish

Over 20 years ago, when AIDS was mowing down friends left and right, I came to St. John's for the first time. I was meeting a friend who had asked me to join him for the funeral of an Episcopal priest whose name I can't remember. At the time, I was a Catholic priest, a Jesuit, and, after several years of parish work in the Northwest, was plugging away at a doctorate in Berkeley. Shortly before my coming to Berkeley, the Vatican had issued another of its searing letters about gays, one that had left me fragmented and weary and wondering where my own life was heading. Finding my way through the red doors of St. John's with my friend, I slumped into the last pew.

To my surprise, that liturgy, with its many stories about this gay priest, gave me a glimmer of hope that my own disparate life could become whole again.

Fast forward several years: I have left the Jesuits and become an Episcopalian, and my partner, Rob, and I have been together five years. A friend, learning we are moving to San Francisco, suggests we check out St. John's.

We did, and we stayed. In time, we were married here. Later, I was received as an Episcopal priest and began assisting here. Later still, perhaps best of all, our son, David, was baptized here.

I remain at St. John's for three reasons.

• The location. During the week, I'm a technical writer in the Financial District working with some of the brightest minds in the country. But Sunday mornings, on my walk to St. John's, I see life from a different angle: giggly children bantering in Spanish with their playmates; homeless people in doorways; carefree twenty-somethings wandering home from a night at the clubs; shopkeepers sweeping up the windblown newspapers, hypodermic needles, and broken wine bottles; bright, colorful murals telling the joys and struggles of this diverse and lively neighborhood. I gather up all this terrible beauty and press it to my heart on my way to the Eucharist.
  

• The people. Despite our ups and downs, the people of this parish keep inspiring me to learn more about Jesus and what it means to follow him. We try, each in our own small ways, to do this--looking out for each other when we get sick, lending a hand to struggling parishes in El Salvador, helping neighborhood kids get a jump on their math and reading, handing out food and vouchers to people off the street, or just being a little kinder, more joyful, throughout the week. We do what we can.
  

• Our seven-year-old son. He's crazy about the place. He loves his friends and the special treatment they get in Godly Play, the ladybugs and spiders in the garden, and the oatmeal raisin cookies that occasionally appear at coffee hour after mass.

Sermon: Do not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled

The other morning, I was riding my bike to Caltrain on my way to work. Before leaving the house, I had read the words Jesus speaks to his anxious disciples in this morning's gospel: Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.

I was pedaling along, mulling these words, when I saw the bright yellow police tape in the distance. Then I saw all the police cars, swarms of whirring minicams, and dazed onlookers milling around. There had been another shooting . As the police motioned us by, I could see the car with the shattered windshield, and the victim's bloody clothes in a heap in the middle of the street.

"Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid." Really?

Later, on the train, I opened the British magazine, The Economist:

Survivors said the gunman killed without saying a word. He shot teachers and students at close range, in the face, in the mouth, anywhere. He put about three bullets into each victim, to make sure. Every time he emptied a magazine, he reloaded with skill and speed. He had plenty of ammunition. He kept on killing until police burst into Norris Hall. Then he shot himself. His face was so badly disfigured that police found it hard, at first, to identify him.

This, of course, is a report of the shootings at Virginia Tech.

"Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid."

Say what?

Don't be troubled? Don't be afraid? That's good advice if we're dealing with neurotic fears, monsters-under-the bed kind of fears about things that don't really exist or aren't really threatening. But fear in the face of violent and senseless death? These are hardly neurotic. In such moments, fear is more than legitimate and healthy, it's even necessary. It motivates people to change things, work for gun control perhaps, march against this senseless war before more sons and daughters are brought home in flag-draped coffins. Fear, good and legitimate fear, can be a powerful ally for life.

So what do these words of Jesus about not being afraid mean? They become all the more curious when you remember that Jesus, made of all the human stuff that we are, was himself so familiar with fear. The gospels paint his fear graphically: sweating blood in Gethsemane, crying out in terror from the cross at what seemed like God's having abandoned him.

So...what to make of these words of Jesus? What do you make of them?

And they're not just the words of Jesus by the way...

Today is Mother's Day. Do you remember as a little kid when you fell off your bike, or a dog barked at you in the park, or you heard loud claps of thunder when you were going to bed--how your mom would hold you in her lap and rock you back and forth and say things like "It's OK. It's OK. Everything is OK. Don't be afraid." Remember? Where does this maternal conviction come from, this sense that, despite all evidence to the contrary, everything is OK.

This powerful and curious conviction echoes throughout our lives and our tradition. I understand that St. Julian of Norwich, the 15th Century woman mystic, is one of the patrons of our parish, that Julian Street was named after her. She had a mantra: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

What is this great mystic, and our moms, and Jesus talking about here? Are they in denial about the pain and tragedy of real life? Maybe they are lying. Perhaps they mean well, to calm us, cheer us up. But maybe they're lying nevertheless...

What do you make of their words?

Let me read you a story from Ireland (how I wish I had a lovely Irish brogue to tell it with!)...

It was a long time ago, but I still remember it, said the old man as he closed his eyes to help sharpen his memory.

It was late in the afternoon. A terrible storm was brewing. The sky was low and dark. I was out in the field. It was no place for a nine-year-old boy to be, so I made for an old shed on the farm where we kept tools and such. But I didn't make it before the storm hit.

Fierce winds, pelting rains, lightening, thunder--I could barely see. I finally found the shed. Once inside, I crouched in a corner, sitting on some rolled up rope.

The shed was old, and the wooden slats had separated. When lightening hit, it sent shafts of light streaking through the cracks. The darkness in the shed would light up and then go dark again. It was like someone standing in the room and turning a light switch on and off.

Suddenly the door of the shed swung open. A massive, bearded man in drenched clothes burst inside and shook himself like a dog. Then he saw me, crouched in the corner. He looked back out the open door at the storm and then back at me. He yelled in a loud deep voice, "Ah, boy. He's trying to scare us today."

Well, that did it. I was already wet, cold, frightened. The last thing I needed was this giant of a strange man bellowing at me. I started to cry.

The man came and sat down next to me. Then he took his fist--it was the size of a sledge--and slammed it into my shoulder. I could feel his breath on my face. "Scaring ain't so bad, boy," he said. Then he laughed.

In this story, the boy is so frightened by the largeness and unpredictability of the world that he cowers in a corner. Suddenly, he is confronted by a still more frightening human figure. The older man knows the terror and the source of the terror. "He's trying to scare us today, boy." Yet the man also knows a power beyond terror that allows him power over it: "Scaring ain't so bad, boy." In these words, the man mediates a saving mystery to the boy. There is a reality that, while it does not do away with terror, allows us to confront it and move through it and overcome it.

And it's out of the knowledge of this larger, saving mystery that Jesus utters his words of peace: "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives."

The peace that the world gives comes and goes. You know how it works: It depends on outer circumstances. When everything is going well, we can manage a certain amount of inner calm. But when bad times come, calm gives way to fear.

But the peace that Jesus gives is perhaps best summed up in St. Paul's eloquence:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, of famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?...No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angles, nor rulers, not things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The conviction of Jesus and so many moms and so many saints is that nothing--not topples from bikes or claps of thunder, not even street shootings and campus massacres and a senseless war--can separate us from the love of God. This faithful, non-abandoning presence of God was revealed on the cross of Jesus. In that place of violence and loss, divine love sustained Jesus and revealed God as a protecting nearness that will never leave us.

The peace that Jesus gives comes from remembering how God once entered fully into that one thing we most fear--the complete loss of everything in death. And in that moment on the cross, God transformed separation and irretrievable loss into a new form of closeness to God and others.

Peace begins to rise in us and we gain power over our fears when we "get" what happened on the cross. We are in an unbreakable relationship with the Source of our being.

If this is true, then "Where, O death, where is your sting?"

So, moms, Happy Mother's Day! Congratulations! OK, we'll admit it, you and Jesus got this right after all!

Please, keep reminding us in your own inimitable ways, of his--and your--words to us: Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.