Re-Opening Our Church Buildings, Restoration of the Soul, Days this Week to Honour, Ken Sehested's Weekly Meditation
Another week has passed in this wild ride of a world we are currently living in, and there is much to reflect upon. So, here are four things for your consideration: the notes from Trinity’s Council meeting concerning the possible re-opening of the church buildings, an opportunity for an evening of restoration and meditation, special dates this week that will help in our on going reflection on the issues of race first raised by Black Lives Matter and Ken Sehested’s wonderful reflection that incorporates both the state of the world this week and the demands of our faith.
Stay awake. Be Aware. Consider. Wonder. And rethink everything that you thought was true. That is what Jesus did, and what he commanded us to do as well.
Lives depend upon it.
Re-Opening the Churches
Thank you to all who filled in the surveys this last two weeks. It is much appreciated by the councils.
Trinity council met this last Tuesday and here are the results and final motions concerning church opening from Trinity below.
Primrose will be meeting this Wednesday evening at 7 pm outside at Primrose United Church, with distancing protocols in place. If weather is a concern, Gail will contact people via email as to location. The churches will vote separately on the issue of reopening as their spaces are particular.
Restoration for the Soul, This Thursday Evening
What could be more wonderful than doing some slow meditative yoga to restore the soul in the midst of an orchard surrounded by gardens? Everyone is so welcome. If money is an issue, just speak to Alissa or myself, and don’t let that keep you from gifting yourself with a time devoted to nurturing your soul. If you are concerned that you don’t know yoga - don’t be. Think of it simply as quiet stretching ending in a restorative nap in a place scented by blossoms. Truly. But you must register so Alissa can plan properly. See her contact information below.
info@alissaprice.ca
(705)-627-4946
Days of the Week to Honour and Reflect Upon
This last week professional sports players made an unprecedented moved to stand in solidarity with the rising voice that is questioning the violence that is perpetrated having its source in deep racial profiling. This is a conversation that Jesus would have been in the middle of - and you know whose side he would be on. So, with the help of the simply amazing SALT Project, an American animation house that supports Christian churches and the Christ ethics they uphold, here are four dates to note this week that help us further understand this on going conversation initiated by Black Lives Matter. Please read. And ponder.
September 1 is the day in 1773 that 20-year-old Phillis Wheatley published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first book of poetry published by an African-American. Kidnapped in West Africa at the age of eight and put on the Phillis, a slave ship, she was sold to a prominent tailor in Boston, John Wheatley, and was manumitted in 1778 - two years after George Washington invited her to his headquarters to meet her, so impressed was he with her poetry. She rarely wrote about herself or her life as an enslaved person - with the notable exception of “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” a poem in which Wheatley pointedly admonishes “Christians” that “Negroes,” too, may “join th’ angelic train.”
September 2 is the birthday of the Austrian writer Joseph Roth, born in 1894, who wrote The Wandering Jews, a book of essays about the plight of European Jews struggling to survive. Of the shtetl, the small Jewish towns of Eastern Europe, Roth wrote: “The shtetl Jews are not rare visitors of God, they live with him. In their prayers they inveigh against him, they complain at his severity, they go to God to accuse God. There is no other people that lives on such a footing with their god. They are an old people and they have known him a long time!”
September 3 is also the date in 1838 that Frederick Douglass, disguised as a sailor, boarded a train to escape from slavery. He went on to become a tireless advocate for the abolition of slavery. He also supported women’s suffrage, and in 1848, was one of the original signatories of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments.” “I love that religion,” he wrote, “which sends its votaries to bind up the wounds of those who have fallen among thieves.” And again: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened around his own neck.”
September 4 is the day in 1957 that Arkansas governor Orval Faubus summoned the National Guard to bar nine black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock. President Dwight D. Eisenhower then sent in the 101st Airborne Division to ensure the students could enroll. In an address to the nation, Eisenhower put it this way: “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.” Today is a day to remember the courage and dignity of the “Little Rock Nine” - and at the same time, to recall and reflect on the “Little Rock Thousand,” the mob of approximately one thousand white people who surrounded Central High School, shouting ugly epithets as the soldiers ushered the nine teenagers into the building.
Reflection from Ken Sehested, Prayer and Politiks - thought provoking, and deeply compassionate, as always…….
Among my bedrock theological convictions is that biblical spirituality is always personal but never private.
In this sense—and this sense only—do I identify as an evangelical Christian. Which is to say, transformation entails a profound shift, deep within, which leverages a corresponding change in behavior and allegiance.
A disarmament of the heart (which usually does not happen all at once but typically grows incrementally) is the unfolding of faith—which, as Clarence Jordan wrote, is not “belief in spite of evidence but life lived in scorn of the consequences."
In so doing, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his prison cell, "we learn to read history from below."