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Father Raymond's Weekly Column
EASTERN CHRISTIAN CONTEMPLATION CLASS
The informational materials for Richard and Doug's Class are available for viewing here.
Eastern Contemplation Notes
WALKABOUT ITINERARY ON THE WEB
If you’re interested in the congregational itinerary for the Bishop Walk Abouts, it’s being published in the March issue of Together, which will be mailed out, or you can download it from the Diocesan Website -
www.dioceserg.org.
SOUP & BREAD CONTINUES
You are invited to share in the Lenten Fellowship of Soup & Bread at 6:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Lent. You can sign up to bring a soup or bread on the door outside the Sanctuary. Also consider joining us for the Healing Eucharist at 6 p.m. where there are prayers for those we care for, anointing with Holy Oil and a Eucharist.
BURNING BUSHES ALL AROUND US
When did you last see a burning bush? Well, it probably wasn’t really a bush or burning. What it probably was, was God trying to get a word in edgewise. It might have been a parent or a child, a friend or an acquaintance. Or it might have been a book you read or a movie you saw. It was something that prickled at your heart. That burning bush is what we pray for… something we can look to for guidance, something that will open our hearts to what God would have us do.
What God wants is for us to repent. That does not mean feeling guilty. What it means is something else. I asked Father Richard Valantasis to share this with you. It’s from the Institute for Contemplative Living that he and Doug Bleyle founded. If you want to check out the ICL, the website is www.institute-contemplativeliving.org .
+ Repentance +
I have always been troubled by the word "repent." My trouble is that it was always thrown at me by someone who was trying to force my life and experience into categories foreign to the way I think. So I've thought about the concept of repentance a great deal over the years.
As I understand the concept from the tradition, repentance is a transformation of the way of thinking and analyzing a way of life. The Greek verb meaning "to repent" is metanoeo, which means to transform the process of thinking. We might call it today something like a "reframing" or "rethinking" that opens new possibilities for considering the context and content of our
way of living.
I had a student working towards a Master of Divinity and ordination as an elder in the United Methodist Church. Through his three years of study, he had learned all the necessary tools for ministry: the history and interpretation of sacred scripture; the history of Christianity; pastoral ministry; ethics and morals; and all the subjects considered essential to a well-trained minister. This student was bright, but found the study tedious and somewhat boring. He often did not see the connection between what he was studying and the profession to which he was called in the church. This is a familiar pattern among students preparing for the ministry. In his last semester of study, he took my course in Eastern Christianity.
In this course we studied Eastern Christian liturgy, icons, theology, spiritual formation, and the seven Ecumenical Councils. It was mostly a course in history, and to my mind not exactly the most thrilling course I've ever taught. But this student came to life. In studying the Eastern Christian concept of divinization or deification, he came to understand Wesley's concept of perfection from a new perspective. The tangible elements of Eastern Christianity (icons and prayer ropes) gave him a very tangible way to understand prayer. The theology of the Councils brought direction and meaning to the dryness of Church History. The sense of the unknowability of God made sense to the mystery of the way the faith operated among the people to whom he ministered. He came to me and said that this course had changed his life. He had a totally new frame through which to understand his own faith and his ministry. It was a life-giving moment in his life that set him off in a new direction, a direction I'm sure his District Superintendent probably didn't understand or appreciate.
Repentance consists first and foremost of a change of the point of reference for living. It is not a line in the sand, a boundary that splits off everything from the past in order to establish an entirely new life. Rather it is a moment of understanding how things might hold together in a way completely different from our expectations. By reframing the context, we begin to find new ways of thinking that open onto new horizons of understanding. We free our minds not so much to forget the past as to open new ways to the future that transform us. And probably most important is that repentance is not necessarily about sin as we commonly understand it as immoral or godless acts. Sin, in the context of repentance, is anything that prevents us from living a life fully in the presence of God. Sin is anything that thwarts our efforts to conform our thinking, and feeling, and living to the divine energy that flows through creation. We repent whenever we are caught short, finding ourselves locked in patterns of thought and living that seem disconnected from the divine energy. And when we are caught short, in that moment of crisis, we begin to reframe how we understand ourselves and how we are to live our lives.
In this sense, repentance is a continual and perpetual process. It is not simply one moment in time, but a repeated process of finding new frames through which to understand our lives and our ways of thinking about our lives in relationship to God. Repentance is a process of conversion, of ever transforming and reframing and reacting in ways that break old and debilitating patterns to open the mind and heart anew to the mystery of God.
Father Richard+
An Introduction to the Sermons
This is an archive of what I have written before I preach on Sundays at Holy Cross. These written words are not the sermons I give during the services, but the preparation I make to hear the Scriptures spoken during the Liturgy of the Word. I preach twice each Sunday and the sermons I deliver at 8 a.m. will differ from the sermon at 10 a.m. There will be similarities, but they come from the confluence of the lessons and the presence of those in our sanctuary. I’ve decided to share these words at the urging of many in the Parish. Please accept them as your priest’s meditations on the Scriptures of the week.These are PDF files, so you will need Adobe Reader to access them.click to download it here.
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