When we go out into the world as we have made it
Everywhere there speaks to us forgetfulness of the Spirit.
If human work were to be without love
The earth would become a bleak and barren desert.
Through forgetfulness of the Spirit
Love ebbs away.
Bring to mind in us, O Christ,
Inspirer of true human love,
How we have come to the earth
From fields of light,
From the heights of the Spirit.
May we bring to earth
What we have seen in the Spirit.
May remembrance of God
Grow strong in our souls
Overcoming the mists
Which hide the meaning
In the work of each day.
When evening came, his disciples went down to the lake, where they got into a boat and set off over the sea for Capernaum. By now it was dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. A strong wind was blowing and the waters grew rough. When they had rowed three or three and a half miles, they saw Jesus approaching the boat, walking on the sea; and they were terrified. But he said to them, “I AM, have no fear” Now when they wanted to take him into the boat, immediately the boat was at the land, at the place where they wanted to go.
2nd Passiontide
March 18, 2020
John 6:16–21
Cynthia Hindes
This gospel reading has the quality of a dream. It starts as something of a nightmare. It is night; the disciples are in a boat, working hard to make headway in rough seas. Suddenly they see Christ. He appears as if walking, a shining form above the waters. At first, they shrink with fear, but he calms them with the assurance of his very being – it is I. And when they take him in, they are suddenly at their destination.
Our lives, too, are sometimes beset with darkness and rough passages. It is just at those times when Christ can make his ever-presence known to us. He assures us that fear can be dispelled because he is the helping Guide on our journey. With his aid, we will reach our goal of firm grounding.
Not only is he our guide for the way, but he is also our bread for the way. Just as after a night on the sea of dreams, we come to the daytime shore refreshed, so too does Christ nourish our spirits. He gives our spirits life and strength. He comes to us, we who trust that we will survive with him, even in the darkest hours. Perhaps, like Rilke, we can also learn to love them. He says,
I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.*
*Ranier Maria Rilke in Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
https://www.thechristiancommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logoBLK-1.png00CCNAhttps://www.thechristiancommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logoBLK-1.pngCCNA2020-04-06 08:53:322020-04-06 08:53:32Prayers for Strength
A corona is a circle of light around an object. The most magnificent corona in our universe is the corona around the sun. It is a fiery circular crown with occasional intense flare-ups. Its rays extend millions of miles into space. What a majestic body our sun is, the source of light and of life.
Looking at the heart, there is also a corona. The heart muscle has its own blood supply. It comes from a crown or corona of blood vessels that circle the heart. This corona can be defective, and then one speaks of coronary heart disease.
And now we have a corona-virus that has unleashed panic around the globe. Borders have been closed. Air travel has been partially suspended. Millions of people are under lockdown. The corona-viruses are named for the crown-like spikes on the surface of the virus. They usually cause mild to moderate upper-respiratory infections, like the common cold. But they can also cause more severe illnesses such as bronchitis and pneumonia, which can, of course, lead to death.
For some time now, people all over the world seem to have fallen under the spell of fear. Fear has entered our lives like a fast-spreading virus. It has become a corona of darkness around the globe. Like the crown-like spikes of the corona-virus, the dark spikes of fear drive people apart. Fear drives people into isolation. Fear contracts and constricts the heart.
And is the heart of humanity not suffering from coronary heart disease, from constriction, and therefore from a lack of love supply? Infectious love and life and laughter are giving way to deadly infections of the soul and the spirit. The world needs healing. We need healing.
As I child I used to sing: ‘The Sun is in my heart …’ We need to re-discover the sun-being in our hearts, in our midst, so that His corona can embrace our frightened humanity and drive away the cold and dark corona of fear, and so that we may find the courage to touch each other’s soul with the contagious healing power of love.
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Please Consider this summer’s ASK 2020 – a conference on our relationship with the living Christ in Atlanta!
As many of us are spending time thinking about the coming of Easter, we may also be planning our gardens for spring planting, summer tending, and autumn harvest. I am contemplating our ASK 2020 conference in Atlanta, as “cultivating the garden of meaning”, which is the title of an article by Rev. Carol Kelly, in Perspectives, a newsletter from the U.K. It struck me as pertinent, because one of her paragraphs says, “We need to gather together as adults for retreats and conferences, to be able to turn off the phone, to become quiet, to listen, to gather insights from one another and to pray. We do not take this seriously enough. Retreats are opportunities for deep community building, for deepening our understanding of the passion and resurrection of Christ, for learning one another’s biographies and strengthening our connection to one another. We have one direction in church, facing the altar. But we have another direction to cultivate in community life, looking toward one another and building Christ-community.”
Please consider joining us June 24-28, this summer, for just such a cultivation of fertile ground. Our website is ask2020atlanta.org.
–Katherine Jenkins
ASK Conference, Coordinating Circle
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https://www.thechristiancommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/MW-Camp-view.jpg604604CCNAhttps://www.thechristiancommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logoBLK-1.pngCCNA2019-05-13 11:11:262019-05-13 11:16:57Gold that lasts the whole year through -- children's summer camp
“Two lights brighten our world. One is provided by the Sun, but another answers to it–the light of the eye. Only through their entwining do we see; lacking either, we are blind. ” ~ Zajonc, Catching the Light. ——
Something more than physical sunlight streams down to Earth. In sunlight, the warm love of the Godhead can be felt. Every human being has light within which responds to the light without. But there is a mystery here. We do not always respond to the light. We do not always tend toward the light like the plants. We have free will. And sometimes we choose to ignore the light and go our own way.
When we are in a Cathedral, we see the light of the sun streaming in through the stained glass in the daytime. At night, we have to be outside to see the light streaming out from within!
And so it is with human beings. In the daytime, we take in the spiritual world in the brightness of day. It is loud here, and we often miss what the spirit is trying to say to us at any given moment. At night, in the darkness, the Spiritual world can much more easily see what is beautiful and worthy streaming out from the light of human beings sleeping.
What gets in the way of the light within us, that it does not always reach the light without? What is the darkness which causes us such chaos and confusion in our times?
We are in darkness when we are not clear. We are in darkness when we are untruthful, when we are vague, when we make assumptions or avoid thinking about the thing that is right in front of us. We are in darkness when we are full of hatred, anger or fear.
But what happens the minute we try to make sense out of what is before us? What activity of the mind starts turning when we go for precision, for clarity, when we are even willing to do a little research? What happens when we try to understand the one who is foreign to us or the one who drives us crazy? Then something begins to awaken in us which leads us towards light. The activity of trying to make sense out of what’s going on when we do not know what or why it is happening develops a capacity in us.
Every object, well-contemplated, opens up a new organ in us. ~Goethe
We are seeking the light in freedom. How can it be that the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not accepted it? (John 1:5) Can we find a way? Can we possibly find Christ’s light in our daylight, and return it to Him in love each night? This would bring grace upon grace to our troubled world.
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The current festival season is Epiphany. Click here to read about it on our festivals page and here for a three kings children’s story.
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There is an inner pathway that leads from Advent through Epiphany. It spirals inward, dwells for twelve days in the light of Christmas, and turns to spiral outward again at Epiphany, January 6.
The path already began to turn inward at Michaelmas, for the dragon that we were meant to conquer is the rapacity of our own natural selfishness, the dragon of our own lower nature. This is, of course, not a one-time victory. The battles continue. And as we traverse the land of the dead in November, through the mighty pictures of the future from the Apocalypse, they warn us that we are to continue with the tasks and trials of cleansing.
In December and Advent, we continue to prepare for the future. And inwardness increases both in our own soul and in the mood of the darkening natural world. The inwardness of both worlds finds its expression in the blue of the altar — a deep blue of infinite calm like the sky before sunrise. This is most appropriate, for in preparing for Christmas we are preparing for and awaiting the birth of the Sun God within us.
This inward turning from Michaelmas to Christmas is a picture for the development of all humankind. Each of us repeats this path in our own development. So just as the history of earthly man began with that fateful apple, each of us is given the apple of our destiny before entering this earthly life. On top of that destiny there rests the potential to ignite a higher self.
In the Advent Garden for children, this potential is symbolized by the candle in the apple that each child carries on the spiral path toward the large central candle that the angel has lighted. We all spiral inward on our path through life, looking for the true center, led by our angel who has gone there before us. Each of us moves toward this center in his own characteristic way. Some of us, like some children, stride quickly and blithely, interested in everything there is to see in earth’s garden. Others are more cautious, anxious to protect their light, and to find just the right place for it.
But eventually we all finally arrive at the center. This center is Christ’s deed on earth. It is a deed that began its visible course with the birth of Jesus at Christmas, prepared by the illuminating plan of the Holy Spirit. At Christmas the altar is illuminated, clothed in the pure white sunrise of spirit light and the pale lilac of new beginnings.
The tender brightness of the twelve holy days of Christmas is a time set apart from the rest of the year. Its twelve days mark the difference between the solar year and the lunar year. Day by day, the Christmas light shines into each of the twelve months of the coming year. It illuminates our future. It is a time that brings special blessings into our coming lives when we work with its deepening and enlivening. Participating in the act of humankind’s consecration during each of these twelve days helps to bring special blessings for the coming year. It helps His light to illuminate us, to be ignited within us.
Then on January 6, at Epiphany, the light from the altar deepens into a warmly incarnated magenta red-violet, a red that faces the darkness of the future with love and trust. Humankind’s future was illuminated by the star of Jesus’ birth. Just as the children have lit their candles in the center of the Advent garden, we have again ignited our higher self at the altar, letting it shine in the center of our being, during this twelve-day season. Now at Epiphany we begin to spiral outward again, out into the world, to illuminate what is still dark, once again to face Herod’s forces of evil that result from human selfishness.
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This article appears in the most recent North American Newsletter, which you can find in its entirety here.
Visit our festival page for more about Christmas in the Christian Community.
