My name is Legion; for we are many.

Alright, so this entry probably will be found to have been more appropriate a week ago, but you know how things are. So let's talk about what happened a week ago that could necessitate a visit to the blog. As everyone knows, the St. Patrick's Day Parade was last Sunday, which was probably a lot of fun. However, if wearing lots of green and being drunk before noon is not really your cup of tea, you could have come and spent it with us at 4pm for a guided meditation brought to you by Jason Elliott. Trust me, this was not an anti-St. Patrick's Day event, nor was it a moral stance. We honestly forgot that this particular Sunday was a special event. Personally, I was there because I had helped plan this exciting event, and my younger brother had been in town the previous five days, so my liver was already on the verge of meltdown.

Aside: So, at 3pm that day was evensong at St. Paul's. Me and Gus Perfect attended and got to share a beautiful service with the officiant, the men's choir, and three other people. The title of this post is a quote from the second reading in Mark 5:1-20. It's the one about the demoniac full of unclean spirits who lived among the tombs. Jesus meets him and makes a deal with the unclean spirits to send them into a nearby herd of swine who, upon being possessed, rushed 2,000 strong down to the sea and committed mass suicide by drowning. See what happens when you make a deal with the devil? That's a lot of lost bacon. Maybe Jesus was getting payoffs from the cattle industry.

Back to the story at hand, the meditation was phenomenal. Jason started out explaining to us the purpose of Ignatian meditation and what we were supposed to walk away with. The Gospel reading was the one about Jesus trashing the vendors in the Temple. After a few minutes to clear our minds and prepare for the meditation, Jason started in with a full description of the scene. We were imagining ourselves as one of Jesus' followers making our way with Jesus and the disciples to the Temple. Jason helped us place ourselves in that particular time and setting through his vivid descriptions of the climate, dress, sounds, smells, and general goings-on en route to the Temple. At the Temple Jason described what we were seeing to prepare us for what comes next. You could really see in your mind's eye as Jesus cracked: money lender booths were overturned and coins flew all over the place causing a mad scramble for the money and making the lender's very irate, cages containing pigeons were smashed sending a huge amount of pigeons flying all over the place, flapping their wings, making annoying cooing sounds, and running straight into people in the havoc, and, finally, pens containing oxen and cattle being loosed, causing newly freed animals stampeding through the Temple, occasionally trampling someone. And just when you didn't know what was to come next or even if you could imagine yourself out of this predicament, everything comes to a halt and it's just you and Jesus. He's welcoming you forward, several tables before him. The tables represent the things about you that are unclean, things that clog your conduit to Jesus. He invites you to flip these tables, ridding yourself of your impurities. No easy task, but one that seems more attainable after watching Jesus clean his own house.

We are told that meditation like this is something that should be done often. There should always be what Jason calls a "fruit." Something that you are striving for and trying to attain. Once you know what that fruit is, you take a story and imagine yourself into it. The deeper you place yourself in the story, the more fully the effect of attaining the fruit will be. It can be any story at any time, but you must focus on the end goal. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this paragraph, it's simply what I recall a week after Jason explained it to us. If you have any interest in this subject, I'm sure that he would be more than willing to walk you through the process. From all of us in the 20s/30s group at St. Paul's, thank you Jason for entertaining us and making another event a wonderful and memorable experience (even though watching you eat that first piece of sushi slathered with wasabi at the mixer was pretty priceless).

A. Peter Snodgrass

Disclaimer: Nothing said above is the official views of the St. Paul's 20s/30s group, St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York, the Presiding Bishop, the Archbishop, or God. Any grievances should be promptly written down, folded, sealed, and dropped in the nearest waste receptacle, where it will hopefully become part of the collective consciousness, rippling out until it reaches me. After all, "My name is Legion; for we are many."