Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Safe Church Meeting 1/22 Postponed
Due to the winter storm the meeting scheduled at Mercer School on Safe Church training tomorrow evening, January 22, will be postponed. The meeting will take place a week later, Wednesday, January 29 at Mercer School, beginning at 6:30 pm.
Be careful if you're on the roads.
-----------------
Thoughts on the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity January 18-25
Dear Friends,
Each year the Church community over the face of the planet is invited to celebrate a week of prayer for Christian unity from January 18th to the 25th. This year's theme comes from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Chapter 1, verse 13 opens with a question: "Has Christ been divided?"
Our instinct, thank God ultimately, is to respond strongly in the negative. There is only one Christ. He cannot be divided, and we are united in him.
But to look around the ecumenical landscape in a following moment is to be compelled to grant that. though Jesus Christ is not divided, we who worship and serve in his name have proven ourselves all too divisible from the beginning.
At least once a year, and more properly once a day, once an hour, once a breath - we should recognize these two truths and act out of them. Not simply to lament our lack of unity, but to actively pray and work for deepened and restored unity in the one Christ.
You can learn more about the observance of this week online at http://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/week-of-prayer and elsewhere as well.
If your parish church has not actively noted and prayed the week this year, make a mental note for 2015.
Here is one of the suggested prayers for this week of prayer:
Most loving and gracious God, we give thanks for the gifts of your grace that we experience in our own tradition and in the traditions of other churches. By the grace of your Holy Spirit, may our gratitude continue to grow as we encounter one another and experience your gift of unity in new ways. This we pray through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
Pax,
John P. McGinty
Canon for Formation
Dean, Mercer School
Saturday, January 11, 2014
Spiritually Alive
Greetings from Mercer School!
On more than a few fronts we are working to continue the renewal of Mercer School of Theology. We do this not for the sake of the school itself, but for the sake of its usefulness to the parishes, people, and clergy of the Diocese and of the whole church. Beyond even that, we are working to renew and upbuild for the sake of the church's mission, undertaken in Christ's name.
One thing that has come to seem both relevant and obvious is the need for more opportunities for us, as individuals and church communities, to grow spiritually. We need to attend to the questions: what is the spirituality that underlies and enlivens my faith? What is my relationship to God, to the person of Jesus Christ? Do I experience God's presence, call, and support in my life?
It is a tall order to effectively offer this kind of experience. It might come in a day of prayer for a parish vestry, in a major event with an invited presenter at Mercer, in an evening retreat or in a couple of days spent away and dedicated to prayer. And these spiritual hungers are present in all of us, certainly both laity and clergy.
It is a blessing that Mercer is not alone in recognizing these needs and responding. We work together with the Society of Saint Francis at Little Portion Friary and with the committed and talented staff at Camp DeWolfe, as well as with parish clergy and lay leaders. In all these places, we are working together to offer substantial support to your spiritual journey, whoever and wherever you are.
Evelyn Underhill, the 20th century spiritual writer and mystic, said that the spiritual life is "the art of union with Reality."
I love that. Do you want to be more in touch with the ultimate Reality? Do you want to be yourself more real? Here are just some of the upcoming opportunities:
Stay tuned as well for details on a lenten season spiritual direction group meeting at Mercer School under the guidance of an experienced director.
In addition to all this, there's a lot more going on educationally at and through Mercer. Check out our calendar often on the Mercer School website (www.mercerschool.org). And we hope you'll enjoy and subscribe to Mercer's new daily online newspaper, Open Gates. You'll find a link to it everyday on our Facebook Page - Conversations at Mercer - and on our Twitter feed - @MercerTheology.
There are many ways for us to connect, whether at Garden City, around the diocese, or online. Let's get together. Mercer. We're your school.
Blessings,
John+
The Very Reverend Canon John P. McGinty
Canon for Formation
jmcginty@dioceseli.org
On more than a few fronts we are working to continue the renewal of Mercer School of Theology. We do this not for the sake of the school itself, but for the sake of its usefulness to the parishes, people, and clergy of the Diocese and of the whole church. Beyond even that, we are working to renew and upbuild for the sake of the church's mission, undertaken in Christ's name.
One thing that has come to seem both relevant and obvious is the need for more opportunities for us, as individuals and church communities, to grow spiritually. We need to attend to the questions: what is the spirituality that underlies and enlivens my faith? What is my relationship to God, to the person of Jesus Christ? Do I experience God's presence, call, and support in my life?
It is a tall order to effectively offer this kind of experience. It might come in a day of prayer for a parish vestry, in a major event with an invited presenter at Mercer, in an evening retreat or in a couple of days spent away and dedicated to prayer. And these spiritual hungers are present in all of us, certainly both laity and clergy.
It is a blessing that Mercer is not alone in recognizing these needs and responding. We work together with the Society of Saint Francis at Little Portion Friary and with the committed and talented staff at Camp DeWolfe, as well as with parish clergy and lay leaders. In all these places, we are working together to offer substantial support to your spiritual journey, whoever and wherever you are.
Evelyn Underhill, the 20th century spiritual writer and mystic, said that the spiritual life is "the art of union with Reality."
I love that. Do you want to be more in touch with the ultimate Reality? Do you want to be yourself more real? Here are just some of the upcoming opportunities:
- February 7/8 Listening to God retreat at Camp DeWolfe;
- March 8 Inaugural Event Opening the Mercer Institute of Spirituality -A series examining what "Being Human" means will open with an afternoon/evening on Focusing and Spirituality with Dr. John McDargh of the Boston College Theology Department.
- March 19, 26 and April 2 Lenten Retreat Evenings at the Good Shepherd Chapel of Mercer School; come to one or all three;
- March 22 A Day of Prayer for Eucharistic Ministers at Camp DeWolfe, open to eucharistic ministers and visitors from across the Diocese of Long Island.
Stay tuned as well for details on a lenten season spiritual direction group meeting at Mercer School under the guidance of an experienced director.
In addition to all this, there's a lot more going on educationally at and through Mercer. Check out our calendar often on the Mercer School website (www.mercerschool.org). And we hope you'll enjoy and subscribe to Mercer's new daily online newspaper, Open Gates. You'll find a link to it everyday on our Facebook Page - Conversations at Mercer - and on our Twitter feed - @MercerTheology.
There are many ways for us to connect, whether at Garden City, around the diocese, or online. Let's get together. Mercer. We're your school.
Blessings,
John+
The Very Reverend Canon John P. McGinty
Canon for Formation
jmcginty@dioceseli.org
Saturday, January 4, 2014
Make It A New Year of Significance
Dear Friends of Mercer School,
I share here a reflection written late on the evening of December 31 of the year just past:
Ninety-two years ago the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, then preacher at the First Presbyterian Church in New York, gave the Cole Lectures for 1922 at Vanderbilt University. These were later collected in book form under the title Christianity and Progress [copyright 1922, Fleming H. Revell Company]. Fosdick, a well-known and sometimes controversial theologian, argued that genuine progress can only be sustained in the context of faith. In his first lecture he said, “This world needs something more than a soft gospel of inevitable progress. It needs salvation from its ignorance, its sin, its inefficiency, its apathy, its silly optimism and its appalling carelessness.”
This might seem a less-than-cheery starting point on this New Year’s Eve entering 2014. Often we speak to one another of the future on this night as if it were to be somehow entirely separated from all that has gone before. Public airwaves and internet blogs review the year past and cast a line into the year ahead, on some occasions with an easy optimism that belies the complexity that relates 11:59 pm of one day with 12:00 am of the next.
Better to seek to leave the past and enter the future with a couple of important tools in the toolbox:
One would be a realistic appreciation of the continuities between today and tomorrow, even those continuities heavy to carry, the ones we wish could be left behind. War. Famine. Political haggling without apparent progress. Deep disagreements between peoples, nations, and faiths that have endured the passing of numberless new year’s eves.
A second tool might be a perspective that sees the present moment in its long-term context. This is neither the best nor the worst of times. It is nestled somewhere between the two, likely comfortable with neither extreme. And also, you can bet, in need of some real improving.
A third tool would be the use of a particularly human gift mentioned and developed by Fosdick in his second lecture almost a century ago. It is the question of meaning that we human creatures put to ourselves both minute-to-minute and throughout our lives: what does this experience, this moment, this event, this night, this life mean? What is its significance? Both the posing and the perhaps-hesitant answering of that question is one of the most powerful tools we can use – both to understand the year that ends tonight and the new one as it begins.
Fosdick puts this forward as one of the key gifts of religion to humanity; religion, a powerful reality yet that has often suffered a bad name in the period between Fosdick and ourselves. He said at Vanderbilt:
“The deep need of a worthy interpretation of life is just as urgent in a world where the idea of progress reigns as in any other, and to supply that need is one of the major functions of religion. For religion is something more than all the creeds that have endeavored to express its thought. Religion is something more than all the organizations that have tried to incarnate its purposes. Religion is the human spirit, by the grace of God, seeking and finding an interpretation of experience that puts sense and worth, dignity, elevation, joy, and hope into life.”
We need to know why. Or at least to place that most human of questions before us always and everywhere. In religion, according to Fosdick, we find a force that both insists we ask the question and introduces us to a Lord whose Gospel is much more than ‘soft.’
Every generation receives this question. It bubbles up from deep within us. We handle it as best we can. Some years, some generations, do a better job of it than others. And then the question, still living and intact, is passed on hand-to-hand and heart-to-heart to the young. Forty years after Fosdick spoke, Baroness Catherine de Hueck Doherty, impassioned Catholic, Russian emigre, founder of Madonna House (an apostolate of laity and priests serving the poor still today), continued her ongoing longtime correspondence with Father Louis, that is, Thomas Merton, Trappist priest, monk, author, activist.
[Compassionate Fire: The Letters of Thomas Merton & Catherine de Hueck Doherty, edited by Robert Wild, Ave Maria Press, 2009].
Expressing her frustration at the formalized, dry, overly-intellectualized approach she saw developing among groups like hers, de Hueck Doherty wrote of her desire “to shout to my fellow lay apostles at those conferences, conventions, THAT NOTHING MATTERS EXCEPT CARITAS!” (capital letters in the original!). The baroness asserts that “worldly competence” only means anything in the context of being motivated first, last, and completely by love.
This is one instance in an endless sea of possible examples of the truth that what we humans do is make meaning, or if you prefer, recognize significance. For Catherine Doherty, meaning is made by love, by reaching out, serving, offering what we have in caritas. We all receive in these latter days a living example of caritas taking the lead in the words, acts, and person of Francis, Bishop of Rome. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby just a day ago seconded Time’s choice of the former Jorge Maria Bergoglio as Person of the Year, calling him ‘an extraordinary man.’
There is a reasonable likelihood that Archbishop Welby, Catherine Doherty, and the Pope himself would be united in a devout wish that Francis would not be so extraordinary in letting love take the lead, but rather one of many who would do so.
Let caritas become quite everyday and ordinary.
Now there’s a New Year’s desire that is both unrealistic and a valid response to the meaning-making of Harry Emerson Fosdick, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, and many other valiant men and women who have lived new year’s eves before this one, and wondered and hoped what the next year would bring as we may do tonight.
The word-master Thomas Merton, in a letter to another great 20th century woman, Dorothy Day, appears to both echo and answer Catherine Doherty as he sets forth all that can be hoped-for on this or any night:
“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.”
[Letter to Dorothy Day, quoted in Catholic Voices In a World on Fire (2005) by Stephen Hand, p. 180].
And so, I can dare to say: Happy New Year!
Pax,
John McGinty+
Dean and Canon for Formation
PS - Registration is still open for the annual workshop for Parish Treasurers and others who may be involved at your church in preparing the annual Parochial Report. Visit our Coming Events/Register tab on our homepage (www.mercerschool.org), click on January 25 and then click on the event title to reach registration information.
We hope to welcome you here to Mercer soon again!
I share here a reflection written late on the evening of December 31 of the year just past:
Ninety-two years ago the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, then preacher at the First Presbyterian Church in New York, gave the Cole Lectures for 1922 at Vanderbilt University. These were later collected in book form under the title Christianity and Progress [copyright 1922, Fleming H. Revell Company]. Fosdick, a well-known and sometimes controversial theologian, argued that genuine progress can only be sustained in the context of faith. In his first lecture he said, “This world needs something more than a soft gospel of inevitable progress. It needs salvation from its ignorance, its sin, its inefficiency, its apathy, its silly optimism and its appalling carelessness.”
This might seem a less-than-cheery starting point on this New Year’s Eve entering 2014. Often we speak to one another of the future on this night as if it were to be somehow entirely separated from all that has gone before. Public airwaves and internet blogs review the year past and cast a line into the year ahead, on some occasions with an easy optimism that belies the complexity that relates 11:59 pm of one day with 12:00 am of the next.
Better to seek to leave the past and enter the future with a couple of important tools in the toolbox:
One would be a realistic appreciation of the continuities between today and tomorrow, even those continuities heavy to carry, the ones we wish could be left behind. War. Famine. Political haggling without apparent progress. Deep disagreements between peoples, nations, and faiths that have endured the passing of numberless new year’s eves.
A second tool might be a perspective that sees the present moment in its long-term context. This is neither the best nor the worst of times. It is nestled somewhere between the two, likely comfortable with neither extreme. And also, you can bet, in need of some real improving.
A third tool would be the use of a particularly human gift mentioned and developed by Fosdick in his second lecture almost a century ago. It is the question of meaning that we human creatures put to ourselves both minute-to-minute and throughout our lives: what does this experience, this moment, this event, this night, this life mean? What is its significance? Both the posing and the perhaps-hesitant answering of that question is one of the most powerful tools we can use – both to understand the year that ends tonight and the new one as it begins.
Fosdick puts this forward as one of the key gifts of religion to humanity; religion, a powerful reality yet that has often suffered a bad name in the period between Fosdick and ourselves. He said at Vanderbilt:
“The deep need of a worthy interpretation of life is just as urgent in a world where the idea of progress reigns as in any other, and to supply that need is one of the major functions of religion. For religion is something more than all the creeds that have endeavored to express its thought. Religion is something more than all the organizations that have tried to incarnate its purposes. Religion is the human spirit, by the grace of God, seeking and finding an interpretation of experience that puts sense and worth, dignity, elevation, joy, and hope into life.”
We need to know why. Or at least to place that most human of questions before us always and everywhere. In religion, according to Fosdick, we find a force that both insists we ask the question and introduces us to a Lord whose Gospel is much more than ‘soft.’
Every generation receives this question. It bubbles up from deep within us. We handle it as best we can. Some years, some generations, do a better job of it than others. And then the question, still living and intact, is passed on hand-to-hand and heart-to-heart to the young. Forty years after Fosdick spoke, Baroness Catherine de Hueck Doherty, impassioned Catholic, Russian emigre, founder of Madonna House (an apostolate of laity and priests serving the poor still today), continued her ongoing longtime correspondence with Father Louis, that is, Thomas Merton, Trappist priest, monk, author, activist.
[Compassionate Fire: The Letters of Thomas Merton & Catherine de Hueck Doherty, edited by Robert Wild, Ave Maria Press, 2009].
Expressing her frustration at the formalized, dry, overly-intellectualized approach she saw developing among groups like hers, de Hueck Doherty wrote of her desire “to shout to my fellow lay apostles at those conferences, conventions, THAT NOTHING MATTERS EXCEPT CARITAS!” (capital letters in the original!). The baroness asserts that “worldly competence” only means anything in the context of being motivated first, last, and completely by love.
This is one instance in an endless sea of possible examples of the truth that what we humans do is make meaning, or if you prefer, recognize significance. For Catherine Doherty, meaning is made by love, by reaching out, serving, offering what we have in caritas. We all receive in these latter days a living example of caritas taking the lead in the words, acts, and person of Francis, Bishop of Rome. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby just a day ago seconded Time’s choice of the former Jorge Maria Bergoglio as Person of the Year, calling him ‘an extraordinary man.’
There is a reasonable likelihood that Archbishop Welby, Catherine Doherty, and the Pope himself would be united in a devout wish that Francis would not be so extraordinary in letting love take the lead, but rather one of many who would do so.
Let caritas become quite everyday and ordinary.
Now there’s a New Year’s desire that is both unrealistic and a valid response to the meaning-making of Harry Emerson Fosdick, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, and many other valiant men and women who have lived new year’s eves before this one, and wondered and hoped what the next year would bring as we may do tonight.
The word-master Thomas Merton, in a letter to another great 20th century woman, Dorothy Day, appears to both echo and answer Catherine Doherty as he sets forth all that can be hoped-for on this or any night:
“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.”
[Letter to Dorothy Day, quoted in Catholic Voices In a World on Fire (2005) by Stephen Hand, p. 180].
And so, I can dare to say: Happy New Year!
Pax,
John McGinty+
Dean and Canon for Formation
PS - Registration is still open for the annual workshop for Parish Treasurers and others who may be involved at your church in preparing the annual Parochial Report. Visit our Coming Events/Register tab on our homepage (www.mercerschool.org), click on January 25 and then click on the event title to reach registration information.
We hope to welcome you here to Mercer soon again!
Friday, December 20, 2013
How well we are loved . . .
Dear Friends,
Writing on the 20th of December, we are yet in the midst of late Advent, with the fourth Sunday of the season approaching in days. And yet, yet, the feeling is more and more of the feast of the Nativity of Christ in just a few days.
The Incarnation, so central to the faith of Christians across the world and over the generations, says so much. It affirms what our instincts tell us: that we are messed up, and that left to ourselves we will make it worse. But that's not all it says, not by a long shot. If that were so Christmas would be much less of a celebration and much more of a downer.
The truth of the Incarnation affirms how much we are worth in the eyes of God, how dear we are to the heart of God. In a word, the Incarnation proclaims that we are worth: everything. It reminds us - on December 25 and on every day of the year that we call Jesus' coming to mind - that we are the beloved of God.
May you and yours know this saving truth deep at heart this Christmas and always! And may our efforts here at Mercer School always assist you in holding that affirmation in both mind and heart.
Wishing you every blessing of the season,
John McGinty+
January
22 - Safe Church Renewed Guidelines meeting for parish leaders.
25 - The Responsible Treasurer, a workshop appropriate to anyone involved in the preparatinon of a congregation's annual Parochial Report.
February
11 - Preaching the Lectionary for Lent and Easter, with Dr. Gordon Lathrop;
12 - Godspell and Bernstein's Mass: Faith and Unbelief in a Secular World; 6 sessions with Gregory Eaton at St Ann & the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn Heights;
20 - Training for new Lay Eucharistic Visitors;
22 - Safe Church Training (SHE-CAP) at Mercer.
March
8 - Mercer Institute of Spirituality Inaugural Event: Being Human -
Focusing and Spirituality: exploring a foundational practice for both pastoral conversation and spiritual growth , with Dr. John McDargh of Boston College;
15 - Leadership Day - "Leadership in the 21st Century Church," including presentations on Who Are We as Church?, Vestry Leadership, Clergy Leadership, Good Meetings, Planning for the Future, and more;
19 - Lenten Retreat Evening - the first of three: Come Aside - Silence and Prayer in Lent.
May
3 - 2nd Annual Faith Formation Convocation: a daylong exploration of formation resources from Sunday School through adult education;
31 - Bishop's Youth Bash.
June
14 - Safe Church Training (summer programs/camps);
21 - 50th Wedding Anniverary Celebration.
Further Spring 2014 events are listed on the Mercer Online Calendar.
For further information and registration, visit www.mercerschool.org. Click from the homepage on Coming Events/Register. On the calendar, find and click on the event date. Locate the event title and click directly on it to open information on the event and how to register. And you can always phone us at 516.248.4800, extension 140.
All these gatherings and more are at your service to help you serve well, to find your call and to live it well.
Writing on the 20th of December, we are yet in the midst of late Advent, with the fourth Sunday of the season approaching in days. And yet, yet, the feeling is more and more of the feast of the Nativity of Christ in just a few days.
The Incarnation, so central to the faith of Christians across the world and over the generations, says so much. It affirms what our instincts tell us: that we are messed up, and that left to ourselves we will make it worse. But that's not all it says, not by a long shot. If that were so Christmas would be much less of a celebration and much more of a downer.
The truth of the Incarnation affirms how much we are worth in the eyes of God, how dear we are to the heart of God. In a word, the Incarnation proclaims that we are worth: everything. It reminds us - on December 25 and on every day of the year that we call Jesus' coming to mind - that we are the beloved of God.
May you and yours know this saving truth deep at heart this Christmas and always! And may our efforts here at Mercer School always assist you in holding that affirmation in both mind and heart.
Wishing you every blessing of the season,
John McGinty+
January
22 - Safe Church Renewed Guidelines meeting for parish leaders.
25 - The Responsible Treasurer, a workshop appropriate to anyone involved in the preparatinon of a congregation's annual Parochial Report.
February
11 - Preaching the Lectionary for Lent and Easter, with Dr. Gordon Lathrop;
12 - Godspell and Bernstein's Mass: Faith and Unbelief in a Secular World; 6 sessions with Gregory Eaton at St Ann & the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn Heights;
20 - Training for new Lay Eucharistic Visitors;
22 - Safe Church Training (SHE-CAP) at Mercer.
March
8 - Mercer Institute of Spirituality Inaugural Event: Being Human -
Focusing and Spirituality: exploring a foundational practice for both pastoral conversation and spiritual growth , with Dr. John McDargh of Boston College;
15 - Leadership Day - "Leadership in the 21st Century Church," including presentations on Who Are We as Church?, Vestry Leadership, Clergy Leadership, Good Meetings, Planning for the Future, and more;
19 - Lenten Retreat Evening - the first of three: Come Aside - Silence and Prayer in Lent.
May
3 - 2nd Annual Faith Formation Convocation: a daylong exploration of formation resources from Sunday School through adult education;
31 - Bishop's Youth Bash.
June
14 - Safe Church Training (summer programs/camps);
21 - 50th Wedding Anniverary Celebration.
Further Spring 2014 events are listed on the Mercer Online Calendar.
For further information and registration, visit www.mercerschool.org. Click from the homepage on Coming Events/Register. On the calendar, find and click on the event date. Locate the event title and click directly on it to open information on the event and how to register. And you can always phone us at 516.248.4800, extension 140.
All these gatherings and more are at your service to help you serve well, to find your call and to live it well.
Friday, December 6, 2013
Mandela and Responsibility to the Future
The world has been singularly focused on the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela since his death last night in South Africa. His is a powerful story of commitment to a cause, of openness to conversion of heart, of a profound ability to hear and connect with an adversary and to invite all to unity.
If you read again through those elements of his life and death, to which many others might eloquently be added, it is clear that these are each and all central aims of the life of the Christian community. Mandela has been a teacher to us all of the possibility of reconciliation and of real progress to move through and past division. He continues to teach those lessons in death. I suspect that his voice will continue to move us for generations. I hope that this will be the case.
We take these lessons and make them real everyday, right where we live and work. If we do not, they will never become real and tangible among us. If we do, we help in quite concrete ways to build a viable and even delightful future. As a part of the Church, our goals here at Mercer School are the same. Our programs are intended to deepen our commitment to Jesus Christ and his Gospel, to call us to always deepening conversion, to open our ears to really hear one another across differences of opinion and to allow shared insights to bloom among us.
This Advent we celebrate a new church year and look ahead to a new calendar year. I want to highlight here a few of our upcoming events over the first weeks and months of the new year:
January
25 - The Responsible Treasurer, a workshop appropriate to anyone involved in the preparatinon of a congregation's annual Parochial Report.
February
11 - Preaching the Lectionary for Lent and Easter, with Dr. Gordon Lathrop;
12 - Godspell and Bernstein's Mass: Faith and Unbelief in a Secular World; 6 sessions with Gregory Eaton at St Ann & the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn Heights;
20 - Training for new Lay Eucharistic Visitors;
22 - Safe Church Training (SHE-CAP) at Mercer.
March
8 - Mercer Institute of Spirituality Inaugural Event: Being Human -
Focusing and Spirituality: exploring a foundational practice for both pastoral conversation and spiritual growth, with Dr. John McDargh of Boston College;
15 - Leadership Day - "Leadership in the 21st Century Church," including presentations on Who Are We as Church?, Vestry Leadership, Clergy Leadership, Good Meetings, Planning for the Future, and more;
19 - Lenten Retreat Evening - the first of three: Come Aside - Silence and Prayer in Lent.
May
3 - 2nd Annual Faith Formation Convocation: a daylong exploration of formation resources from Sunday School through adult education;
31 - Bishop's Youth Bash.
June
14 - Safe Church Training (summer programs/camps);
21 - 50th Wedding Anniverary Celebration.
Further Spring 2014 events are listed on the Mercer Online Calendar.
For further information and registration, visit www.mercerschool.org. Click from the homepage on Coming Events/Register. On the calendar, find and click on the event date. Locate the event title and click directly on it to open information on the event and how to register. And you can always phone us at 516.248.4800, extension 140.
All these gatherings and more are at your service to help you serve well, to find your call and to live it well. As Nelson Mandela taught us:
Advent blessings,
John+
(Photo courtesy of Huffington Post: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/15-of-nelson-mandelas-most-inspiring-quotes)
If you read again through those elements of his life and death, to which many others might eloquently be added, it is clear that these are each and all central aims of the life of the Christian community. Mandela has been a teacher to us all of the possibility of reconciliation and of real progress to move through and past division. He continues to teach those lessons in death. I suspect that his voice will continue to move us for generations. I hope that this will be the case.
We take these lessons and make them real everyday, right where we live and work. If we do not, they will never become real and tangible among us. If we do, we help in quite concrete ways to build a viable and even delightful future. As a part of the Church, our goals here at Mercer School are the same. Our programs are intended to deepen our commitment to Jesus Christ and his Gospel, to call us to always deepening conversion, to open our ears to really hear one another across differences of opinion and to allow shared insights to bloom among us.
This Advent we celebrate a new church year and look ahead to a new calendar year. I want to highlight here a few of our upcoming events over the first weeks and months of the new year:
January
25 - The Responsible Treasurer, a workshop appropriate to anyone involved in the preparatinon of a congregation's annual Parochial Report.
February
11 - Preaching the Lectionary for Lent and Easter, with Dr. Gordon Lathrop;
12 - Godspell and Bernstein's Mass: Faith and Unbelief in a Secular World; 6 sessions with Gregory Eaton at St Ann & the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn Heights;
20 - Training for new Lay Eucharistic Visitors;
22 - Safe Church Training (SHE-CAP) at Mercer.
March
8 - Mercer Institute of Spirituality Inaugural Event: Being Human -
Focusing and Spirituality: exploring a foundational practice for both pastoral conversation and spiritual growth, with Dr. John McDargh of Boston College;
15 - Leadership Day - "Leadership in the 21st Century Church," including presentations on Who Are We as Church?, Vestry Leadership, Clergy Leadership, Good Meetings, Planning for the Future, and more;
19 - Lenten Retreat Evening - the first of three: Come Aside - Silence and Prayer in Lent.
May
3 - 2nd Annual Faith Formation Convocation: a daylong exploration of formation resources from Sunday School through adult education;
31 - Bishop's Youth Bash.
June
14 - Safe Church Training (summer programs/camps);
21 - 50th Wedding Anniverary Celebration.
Further Spring 2014 events are listed on the Mercer Online Calendar.
For further information and registration, visit www.mercerschool.org. Click from the homepage on Coming Events/Register. On the calendar, find and click on the event date. Locate the event title and click directly on it to open information on the event and how to register. And you can always phone us at 516.248.4800, extension 140.
All these gatherings and more are at your service to help you serve well, to find your call and to live it well. As Nelson Mandela taught us:
John+
(Photo courtesy of Huffington Post: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/15-of-nelson-mandelas-most-inspiring-quotes)
Monday, December 2, 2013
Lighting Up Advent
Over the past few days, since Thanksgiving came and went and Advent has begun, I've been at times on the road after dark (as most of the day is after dark at this point in the year!). One of the things that I have noticed over this brief period is quite obvious: if not before Thanksgiving, certainly immediately afterwards, many homes are brightly lit with decorations looking forward to the celebration of Christmas.
Or perhaps to put it more realistically in our present culture, the actual celebration of Christmas for many is taking place now in the work of decorating the interior and exterior of homes, in shopping, in listening to Christmas music on the radio or online. For many. Christmas is now. It will end the morning of December 25th.
On the one hand, this means that the Christian church needs to be all the more intentional about keeping Advent. Advent is its own proper season, with its own long and storied history, and its own gifts of expectation, patience, and a rich sharing in liturgy of the beauty of the scriptures. We lose Advent and its gifts, as many have, at our own peril, with regard to living life at a human pace and with spiritual depth.
On the other hand, the dyspepsia between the church season and society's take on the season becomes all-too-visible as one drives through neighborhoods these present evenings. What do I mean? One sees brightly lit houses in their dozens and eventually hundreds, decorated beautifully, proclaiming at the very least that there is something special about this season. Then one comes across a Christian house of worship, of virtually any denomination or non-, including our own, and the building in which the Christians meet is either darkened or looks exactly as it does throughout the year. There is nothing visible to say or to confirm: this is a special time.
I am not suggesting that our churches decorate now for the Christmas season. To do so would be to betray the reality of Advent, and if the church does that, this gorgeous season so little kept will be a goner. What I am suggesting is that either:
- - we need to find a way, using greens and Advent colors and light, to allow our church buildings to say out loud now, "This is Advent, and it counts for something, and we are joyfully and intentionally and lovingly preparing for the coming of the Savior!" or
- - we need to decorate our church exteriors amazingly well with Christmas decorations once the Christmas season actually begins and for its entire length, while early-bought Christmas trees languish on the sidewalks waiting for the sanitation truck as early as noontime on December 25.
We have so much to share in the gifts of Advent that can deepen the coming celebration of the Nativity for all. What can we do to look like this is really true?
***
A renewed invitation to join us on Mercer School's Facebook page, Conversations at Mercer, for a shared reading and discussion of Christopher Webber's Advent with Evelyn Underhill. We'll be there every day throughout the Advent and Christmas seasons,
Pax,
John+
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Welcome to the Beginning.
There is a wisdom to beginning anew, with some regularity. At work it is good to step back now and then and consider whether we are progressing as desired, or whether we are even still on the path we first elected. In personal and family life, where routine can become the enemy of love's expression, how important it is often to pause and look into the eyes of a loved one as if we were seeing them for the first time. What a miracle it is that this person exists at all, and is in my life, and that we are joined by the bond of love.
The liturgical year of the Church's life bears this same wisdom to us. Last Sunday we celebrated the final Sunday of the Church's year, bowing before Christ the King. This very next Sunday we find ourselevs at the beginning, at the first Sunday of the Church's year, at the threshold of Advent. Grace invites us to see the presence and the promise of God today with a fresh eye, to hear the Gospel as if we never had before, to wake up to the wonder of God existing at all, of God caring for us at all, of God caring beyond all borders and electing to come among us. Today we begin, anew, to consider all of this, and so much profoundly more. What a gift.
At Mercer School we begin by inaugurating this afternoon our online reading, in common, of Christopher Webber's edited collection, Advent with Evelyn Underhill. Join us on Mercer's Facebook page, Conversations at Mercer, to discuss day-by-day through the season what Evelyn Underhill shares with us and how it applies to us now during Advent 2013.
In this season, as always, responsibilities continue. Among our responsibilities to one another in Church and society is that of confronting racism, of coming to understand and know one another across differences, respecting and celebrating our diversity all the while. For many, this is a challenge. We seek to help one another by beginning again the offering of Racism Awareness workshops here in the Diocese of Long Island. The first is scheduled for Saturday, December 14th at Mercer in Garden City. Information on the day, and online registation instruction, is available from the Mercer homepage (www.mercerschool.org) by clicking on Coming Events/Register on the lefthand column. From the calendar that appears, click on the date of December 14th, There you will you see RAP listed (Racism Awareness Program). Click directly on the program title and you'll see a description you can scroll through and a link to register, Incidentally you can explore and register for all Mercer's offerings in the same way.
Blessings to all as we begin again together. Thanks be to God for the opportunity!
Pax,
John+
The liturgical year of the Church's life bears this same wisdom to us. Last Sunday we celebrated the final Sunday of the Church's year, bowing before Christ the King. This very next Sunday we find ourselevs at the beginning, at the first Sunday of the Church's year, at the threshold of Advent. Grace invites us to see the presence and the promise of God today with a fresh eye, to hear the Gospel as if we never had before, to wake up to the wonder of God existing at all, of God caring for us at all, of God caring beyond all borders and electing to come among us. Today we begin, anew, to consider all of this, and so much profoundly more. What a gift.
At Mercer School we begin by inaugurating this afternoon our online reading, in common, of Christopher Webber's edited collection, Advent with Evelyn Underhill. Join us on Mercer's Facebook page, Conversations at Mercer, to discuss day-by-day through the season what Evelyn Underhill shares with us and how it applies to us now during Advent 2013.
In this season, as always, responsibilities continue. Among our responsibilities to one another in Church and society is that of confronting racism, of coming to understand and know one another across differences, respecting and celebrating our diversity all the while. For many, this is a challenge. We seek to help one another by beginning again the offering of Racism Awareness workshops here in the Diocese of Long Island. The first is scheduled for Saturday, December 14th at Mercer in Garden City. Information on the day, and online registation instruction, is available from the Mercer homepage (www.mercerschool.org) by clicking on Coming Events/Register on the lefthand column. From the calendar that appears, click on the date of December 14th, There you will you see RAP listed (Racism Awareness Program). Click directly on the program title and you'll see a description you can scroll through and a link to register, Incidentally you can explore and register for all Mercer's offerings in the same way.
Blessings to all as we begin again together. Thanks be to God for the opportunity!
Pax,
John+
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