Esteban was twin to Manual. He and his brother grew up in an orphanage. They were tall, handsome and hard workers. These two were as one, no one really knew which was who. It was almost as if they were one person living in two bodies. Until one day Manual fell in love. This was when the two began to separate.

Esteban and his brother kept to themselves most of the time. There were a few people who impacted Esteban's life. The Abbess raised the boys, influencing them in their writing, other skills, and teaching them the way of the Lord. After Manual died, Esteban went into a deep depression. He even tried many times to kill himself by doing dangerous rescues. When these attempts didn't work, Esteban attempted to hang himself. This is when Esteban was saved by Captain Alvarado. The Captain asked Esteban to come with him , to help on his ship, and busy the pain away. Esteban agreed, a couple days later, he died on the Bridge.

Was Esteban's death an accident or a plan by the All Mighty? Esteban was starting over, but in what, a new life without his brother or a new life with God? In this story, Wilder expands our minds to think about the question, are we all an accident and just die by accident or are we all part of a plan and our death is planned out before it happens?

I believe God created us to make choices. Our choices create our destiny. I also believe God is with us when we make our choices and hopefully His word influences the choices we make. While I don't believe life is a total accident, I don't believe God has it planned out in stone either. We are part of God's plan, making our choices with His guidance.

In the book we read , The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Dona Clara was the daughter of Dona Maria. When she grew up her mother worshiped her which really got on her nerves. She would take advantage of her mother's wealthiness and the way she felt made it easier to get it. When she got older she totally forgot about her mother and moved to Spain and got a very wealthy man.

In the story Dona Maria kept sending countless letters to her daughter. She never read them though. Her husband kept them and they still survive today thanks to him. Before Dona Maria died she sent a final letter that showed something her daughter had never seen before. It showed true love, love that had never been felt by Dona Clara. She then gave her mothers money to the church and orphanage instead of donating it to science which she had previously planned. The whole book has to do religion versus science.

The author used the characters to illustrate theme by showing that either by an act of god or an accident. People die and that can change people's perspective on life. If the collapse of the bridge was just a random event or those five people deserved to die, it still happened an they did die, and that combined combined with that last letter changed Dona Clara's view of her mother and her life.

Mother Superior was a head nun at a convent. She was a feminist she believed women should be respected. Men in this society treated women like work animals not people. Mother superior also had an foster home in her church which there was a small girl she was very close to her. Mother Superior taught this little girl everything. Pepita was the little girl's name and she was basically a daughter to Mother Superior.

When Donna Marie came to adopt Pepita Mother was worried for her because Donna Marie was crazy but she said it would be good to because she would get to see what it's like to live in the palace. Mother had an impact on Pepita because when she went to Donna's house she thought about what Mother said about always obeying your elders and this is when Pepita was left on the conner of the church when Donna went to the church to pray. She also had an effect on Donna Marie because Donna was always worried about someone else and never thought about herself and then she realize it was not worth worrying all the time about other people.

The death's that effected mother Superior's life were Esteban, Pepita, and Donna Marie. Pepita had an effect on Mother was Pepita was like a daughter to Mother and she taught her everything and she was going to follow and take over Mother's job. Then she lost the twins and she felt like she was loosing hope because these two were like her children. Then Donna Marie died and she left all her money to the church. She felt better when she received the money and Camellia help her to feel a whole lot better about the future.

When Dona Maria was a little kid her mother wanted her to main stream with popular pretty girls. She was never really accepted, because she was a little awkward and never picked up on social cues. Her mother pushed her into these groups and wanted her to be something she was not. When she turned 20 she married a ruined nobleman. Dona Maria had a child, Dona Clara.

Dona Clara didn't like listening to her mother. She thought that she was insignificant. Dona Clara left to go to Spain. Dona Maria wanted her daughter to love her so much that he sent her extravagant letters. These letters were so good that they were put into textbooks for school boys to study.

Since Dona Maria was Marquesa de Montemayer she had much influence over many people. Her servant Pepita had a lot to do with Dona Maria. She made Dona Maria feel courage and independent. Pepita also made Dona Maria notice that she doesn't need to give people stuff to make them like her.

Well of course she died from the fall of the bridge, but you could say she killed her old-self to make way for her rebirth. Her rebirth happened when she figured out that she needed to be more independent and live bravely in the true love of God. I believe when she fell from the bridge that it was time for her to go.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s investiture sermon

(ENS)

Investiture
4 November 2006
National Cathedral

Where is home for you? How would you define your home? A friend in Nevada said to me just before I left that he had thought I would only leave Nevada to go home, and in his mind, that meant Oregon. But in the six years I spent there, Nevada became home. The state song is even called, “Home means Nevada.” And for a place filled with folk who have come from elsewhere, that is quite remarkable – all sorts and conditions of rootless people trying to grow new roots in the desert.

So where is home for you? Des Moines or Anchorage or Taipei or San Salvador or Port au Prince?

What makes it home? Familiar landscape, a quality of life, or the presence of particular people?

Some people who engage this journey we call Christianity discover that home is found on the road, whether literally the restless travel that occupies some of us, or the hodos that is the Way of following the one we call the Christ. The home we ultimately seek is found in relationship with creator, with redeemer, with spirit. When Augustine says “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee, O Lord” he means that our natural home is in God.

The great journey stories of the Hebrew Bible begin with leaving our home in Eden, they tell of wandering for a very long time in search of a new home in the land of promise, and they tell later of returning home from exile. And eventually Israel begins to realize that they are meant to build a home that will draw all the nations to Mount Zion. Isaiah’s great vision of a thanksgiving feast on a mountain, to which the whole world is invited, is part of that initial discovery of a universal home-building mission, meant for all. Jesus’ inauguration and incarnation of the heavenly banquet is about a home that does not depend on place, but on community gathered in the conscious presence of God.

In Death of the Hired Man, Robert Frost said that “home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” We all ache for a community that will take us in, with all our warts and quirks and petty meannesses – and yet they still celebrate when they see us coming! That vision of homegoing and homecoming that underlies our deepest spiritual yearnings is also the job assignment each one of us gets in baptism – go home, and while you’re at it, help to build a home for everyone else on earth. For none of us can truly find our rest in God until all of our brothers and sisters have also been welcomed home like the prodigal.

There’s a wonderful Hebrew word for that vision and work – shalom. It doesn’t just mean the sort of peace that comes when we’re no longer at war. It’s that rich and multihued vision of a world where no one goes hungry because everyone is invited to a seat at the groaning board, it’s a vision of a world where no one is sick or in prison because all sorts of disease have been healed, it’s a vision of a world where every human being has the capacity to use every good gift that God has given, it is a vision of a world where no one enjoys abundance at the expense of another, it’s a vision of a world where all enjoy Sabbath rest in the conscious presence of God. Shalom means that all human beings live together as siblings, at peace with one another and with God, and in right relationship with all of the rest of creation. It is that vision of the lion lying down with the lamb and the small child playing over the den of the adder, where the specter of death no longer holds sway. It is that vision to which Jesus points when he says, “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” To say “shalom” is to know our own place and to invite and affirm the place of all of the rest of creation, once more at home in God.

You and I have been invited into that ministry of global peace-making that makes a place and affirms a welcome for all of God’s creatures. But more than welcome, that ministry invites all to feast until they are filled with God’s abundance. God has spoken that dream in our hearts – through the prophets, through the patriarchs and the mystics, in human flesh in Jesus, and in each one of us at baptism. All are welcome, all are fed, all are satisfied, all are healed of the wounds and lessenings that are part of the not-yet-ness of creation.

That homecoming of shalom is both destination and journey. We cannot embark on the journey without some vision of where we are going, even though we may not reach it this side of the grave. We are really charged with seeing everyplace and all places as home, and living in a way that makes that true for every other creature on the planet. None of us can be fully at home, at rest, enjoying shalom, unless all the world is as well. Shalom is the fruit of living that dream. We live in a day where there is a concrete possibility of making that dream reality for the most destitute, forgotten, and ignored of our fellow travelers – for the castaways, for those in peril or just barely afloat on life’s restless sea.

This church has said that our larger vision will be framed and shaped in the coming years by the vision of shalom embedded in the Millennium Development Goals – a world where the hungry are fed, the ill are healed, the young educated, women and men treated equally, and where all have access to clean water and adequate sanitation, basic health care, and the promise of development that does not endanger the rest of creation. That vision of abundant life is achievable in our own day, but only with the passionate commitment of each and every one of us. It is God’s vision of homecoming for all humanity. [Applause]

The ability of any of us to enjoy shalom depends on the health of our neighbors. If some do not have the opportunity for health or wholeness, then none of us can enjoy true and perfect holiness. The writer of Ephesians implores us to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace – to be at one in God’s shalom. That is our baptismal task and hope, and unless each of the members of the body enjoys shalom we shall not live as one. That dream of God, that word of God spoken in each one of us at baptism also speaks hope of its realization.

The health of our neighbors, in its broadest understanding, is the mission that God has given us. We cannot love God if we fail to love our neighbors into a more whole and holy state of life. If some in this church feel wounded by recent decisions, then our salvation, our health as a body is at some hazard, and it becomes the duty of all of us to seek healing and wholeness. As long as children live exposed on the streets, while seniors go without food to pay for life-sustaining drugs, wherever peoples are sickened by industrial waste, the body suffers, and none of us can say we have finally come home.

What keeps us from the tireless search for that vision of shalom? There are probably only two answers, and they are connected – apathy and fear. One is the unwillingness to acknowledge the pain of other people, the other is an unwillingness to acknowledge that pain with enough courage to act. The cure for each is a deep and abiding hope. If God in Jesus has made captivity captive, has taken fear hostage, it is for the liberation and flourishing of hope. Augustine said that as Christians, we are prisoners of hope – a ridiculously assertive hope, a hope that unflinchingly assails the doors of heaven, a hope that will not cease until that dream of God has swallowed up death forever, a hope that has the audacity to join Jesus in saying, “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

And how shall that scripture be fulfilled in our hearing? In the will to make peace with one who disdains our theological position – for his has merit, too, as the fruit of faithfulness. In the courage to challenge our legislators to make poverty history, to fund AIDS work in Africa, and the distribution of anti-malarial mosquito nets, and primary schools where all children are welcomed. In the will to look within our own hearts and confront the shadows that darken the dream that God has planted there.

That scripture is fulfilled each time we reach beyond our narrow self-interest to call another home.

That scripture is fulfilled in ways both small and large, in acts of individuals and of nations, whenever we seek the good of the other, ifor our own good and final homecoming is wrapped up in that.

God has spoken that dream in us, let us rejoice! Let us join the raucous throngs in creation, the sea creatures and the geological features who leap for joy at the vision of all creation restored, restored to proper relationship, to all creation come home at last. May that scripture be fulfilled in our hearing and in our doing.

Shalom, chaverim, shalom, my friends, shalom.

[Congregation responded: Shalom]

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church

I believe everyday experiences can change a person if they are open to seeing in a new way. Just recently, a homeless man came up to the skate park while I was there. The man was dancing around and smiling, which made me smile. When I looked around though everyone was pointing and laughing. When the old man sat down and started talking, people would make jokes, take his stuff and then throw it at him. It was hurting me to see people treating another person like that. Eventually, the old man came up to and started talking to me.

Everyone around me was talking about him; I just listened to what he had to say. He told me about his sons and how he made bad choices in life. He asked me to listen to my elders because there is always something to learn from them. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic baggy. It was full of trash he had collected. He explained to me how it was a puzzle. He pointed out the different colors telling me what they meant. After explaining all that was in the bag he handed it to me. I didn't know what to do, so I just held onto it.

After just sitting next to him for a while, I told him I needed to to talk to someone. When we said 'bye and I walked over to my friends. They asked me what he said; I couldn't really answer them. They didn't really care, they only wanted to twist his words to continue making fun of him.

My friends couldn't understand why I stayed and talked to him. The whole time I was thinking of the Golden Rule, “Love thy Neighbor as thy Self.” I just sat there and talked. It didn't hurt me to listen to what he had to say. A lot of my friends kept making fun of him, even after he left. I think they made fun of him because of their own insecurities. It is easier to make yourself feel better by tearing others down than it is to reach out and help another person.

I left the park that day thinking about the old man. If everyone in the world were that friendly, life would be so much more peaceful. I want to be like that. When I come across people who I wouldn't normally talk to, I talk to them. I want to know them. Each person on this planet has something to teach me. And who knows we may turn out to be great friends.

I posted this essay here because as I read it I thought about all the different reasons parents tell me they homeschool. This essay is exactly why I homeschooled! While reading it I went through a whole series of emotions. But mostly I was scared (I didn't know she had this encounter) and I was proud (she treated another human being with kindness and compassion).

I have always said you "know" when they are ready for college and I think this essay shows a confident young woman who is ready to face and engage the world on her own terms. I will miss her, probably even more than I miss Kayleigh. Athena has a calmness about her that soothes anyone in her presence!