The Unfamiliar Name

About

Haley and the five children outside Saint Michael’s, in front of a stained-glass window, one of them holding a bouquet.
Haley and the five, outside Saint Michael’s.
Jesse and Haley at sunset on the Eiffel Tower, the city behind them.
Haley and me, Paris.

I’m Jesse Harris. I am a deacon in the Charismatic Episcopal Church, serving at Saint Michael’s Church in San Clemente, California, the parish where the CEC began and where I preach, sit on the Rector’s Council, and lead the Parish Council. I also direct communications for the communion through Three Streams United. On weekdays, from before dawn until the middle of the afternoon, I drive a truck for a construction company. The preaching and the writing happen in the hours around that.

Haley and I have five children. She teaches at Saint Michael’s Christian Academy and is an artist.

The name

The name comes from the fourth movement of T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, the last of the Four Quartets and my favorite poem. Eliot is writing about the fire of God’s love, which is at once the fire of judgment and the fire of redemption: the same love, received as torment or as glory depending on what we do with it. He asks who devised that torment, and answers with a single word, and then gives it its name. The claim of the poem, and of this site, is that the love of God is the most familiar thing in the world and the least understood, and that the whole Christian life is learning to call it by its name.

The phoenix on the door is for the same reason. We are all consumed by one fire or another.

What is here

Essays are the longer pieces: things I have written for Three Streams United and for the parish, a conversation or two, and the occasional note that is really just me thinking in public.

Sermons are what I have preached at Saint Michael’s since 2021, edited from the recordings so they read the way they were meant to be heard. Each one links to the video.

The podcast ran from 2016 to 2022. The episodes are still up.

What I love

In no particular order, and the order would not be this one: Jesus; Haley and the kids; the Church and her liturgy; Tolkien, Lewis, and the rest of the Inklings; Malcolm Guite; writing; a pipe, a glass of whiskey, and a good cigar in the right company; Celtic knotwork and illuminated manuscripts; and books, too many of them, in a vault of notes that has grown into a small library.

If you want to write to me, the address is theunfamiliarnamepodcast@gmail.com.