Playing a Part in God's Story

Beloved in Christ, 

I'm spending today and tomorrow morning with the students, faculty, and staff at Shattuck-Saint Mary's School in Faribault. I don't get to spend a lot of time with our two schools, so it is a real gift to get a deeper sense of life at Shattuck for a few days. There is a staggering diversity of religious backgrounds, traditions, racial, ethnic, and national groups represented. The work that happens here--of engaging young minds, forming hearts, nurturing souls, and working to become one small picture of Beloved Community--is profoundly holy. God is clearly at work everywhere in the teaching, learning, and love that drive this community. 

Like so many places around our diocese, one can't help but sense here a powerful and palpable connection to our long, rich, and complex history. The Diocese of Minnesota exists today because of the many ways those who came before us have exhibited heroic faith and courageous love; the ways they have extended grace and received forgiveness; the ways God has continued to sustain our life and witness alongside our very best efforts, and through our tragic shortcomings and heartbreaking failures. We are always part of and shaped by a story that is so much larger than our generally small and narrow lives. 

Being on campus at Shattuck, standing in the cemetery at St. Columba's, White Earth, paddling a kayak on Lake Pepin, and on and on, are all ways of remembering that we stand in a tradition. Claiming and honoring that tradition is not, as so many have imagined, worshipping the past and turning a blind eye to the pain and sin so etched into it. Rather, revering the tradition we stand in is a matter of understanding the best of who God has been trying to shape us into, claiming the collective spirit of those who have lived and loved on this sacred ground before us, repenting for the damage we have knowingly or unknowingly done, and working to repair it in whatever we way can; offering with our forebears our own broken efforts to the God whose grace alone can mold us, and the whole creation, into what God longs to bring forth.

Wherever you are planted across this magnificent piece of God's earth that is Minnesota, I hope you'll take a moment, as I have done today, to soak in what a gift it is to play a part in God's long, ancient, and tangled story together. What a deep privilege to offer our own broken and imperfect efforts as a chapter. 

Grace and peace,

The Right Reverend Craig Loya
X Bishop