Worship services:
Readings:
Gen 14:18-20; Ps 116:10-17; 1 Cor 11:23-26, Jn 6:51-58
This week: Trinity Sunday
Rowan Williams on the Trinity:
We believe that Jesus, Son of Mary, is fully a human being. But we believe more than that.
Because of the divine authority that he shows in his power to teach and to forgive, as our gospels describe it, we say also that the whole of his human life is the direct effect of God’s action working in him at every moment.
Some of our teachers have said that his human life is like iron that has been heated in the fire until it has the same power to burn as the fire does.
We call him the Son of God. But we do not mean by this that God has physically begotten him, or that he is made to be another God alongside the one God.
We say rather that the one God is first the source of everything, the life from which everything flows out. Then we say that the one God is also in that flowing-out.
The life that comes from him is not something different from him. It reflects all that he is. It shows his glory and beauty and communicates them.
Once again, our teachers say that God has a perfect and eternal ‘image’ of his glory, sometimes called his wisdom, sometimes called his ‘word’, sometimes called his ‘son’, though this is never to be understood in a physical and literal way.
And we say that the one God, who is both source and outward-flowing life, who is both ‘Father’ and ‘Son’, is also active as the power that draws everything back to God, leading and guiding human beings towards the wisdom and goodness of God. This is the power we call ‘Holy Spirit’.
So when we speak of ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’, we do not at all mean to say that there are three gods – as if there were three divine people in heaven, like three human people in a room.
Certainly we believe that the three ways in which God eternally exists and acts are distinct – but not in the way that things in the world or even persons in the world are distinct.
Service times at the lovely All Saints Church in Poowong will change from the beginning of September.
Beginning on 13 September, Holy Communion will begin at 11am, and be held on the second and fourth Sundays of each month.
People who haven’t been involved in churches for a very long time have trusted their friends, they have responded to the invitations and they have joined in the celebrations, it has gone brilliantly. (Bishop Stuart Robinson, previously of St Paul’s Chatswood, now Bishop of Canberra-Goulburn).
Back to Church Sunday seeks to provide an opportunity for people to re-encounter the Church. Some of the people who come along may not have been to church for a very long time, and Back to Church Sunday provides an opportunity to get back in touch in a non-threatening way.
Our parish will be participating in Back to Church Sunday on 13 September 2009. We’ll be welcoming people at our 9.30am service at Korumburra.
This video is for people who are wondering what Back to Church Sunday is all about.
This video is for people preparing for Back to Church Sunday.
People from the parish will join together to share food and fellowship at Pizza House in Korumburra, from 5.30pm on 9 August 2009. We’ll discuss Bishop John’s recent letter, “Prayer Engages With God Beside Me.“
Australian signer, Nick Cave, famously begins his song ‘Into my Arms’ with the words “I don’t believe in an interventionist God” and then goes on to express the plea that God would somehow deliver the woman he loves into his arms. In this delightfully poetic way, he introduces something of the dilemma of prayers; when we pray, what are we thinking about God and what do we expect of God?
My initial reaction to the song some years ago was to think Cave’s dilemma would be resolved were he to believe that God is an interventionist God. Now, I am not so sure. Now, I think the notion of an interventionist God creates more dilemmas than it solves. Certainly it leaves us to deal with those moments God did not intervene when it was so clear to us that God should have intervened, perhaps to prevent some horrifying disaster. Or perhaps, even worse, how it could be that God seems to have intervened to rescue one person but not another from the same disaster.
My musings about such matters have led me to the point where I believe it is better to understand God as constantly and consistently engaged in the world, in, through and under the whole of creation, than to see God as popping into the world from time to time, for some reason known only to God, to answer some person’s prayerful bidding. In fact, I would go so far as to say that were it not for God’s constant and consistent presence in the midst of the life of the world, the life of the world could and would not be sustainable. Without God’s presence in every moment, we would not last beyond any moment.
In this scheme of things, prayer is not asking God to intervene in the life of the world but is engaging in the world on God’s terms, in company with an ever-present God. To pray,, then, is to entrust our lives to God and our ways to God’s way in the midst of life as we find it in any given moment or situation, rather than to expect God to leap to our aid from somewhere outside the world in response to our prayerful calls for assistance.
When understanding prayer as engagement with an ever-present God, we can certainly still recognise that turning to God in the midst of life does make a tangible difference and that startling things do happen only because God is involved. We can still meaningfully talk about what we call ‘miracles’, not because God has intervened but because the God who is ever-present has acted.
A conclusion to which all this musing drives me is that prayer is therefore a constant demand in our lives. St Paul’s call to “pray without ceasing” makes great sense. It is a call always to seek the heart and mind of God in the midst of life. It is a call constantly to be turning to the God is is ever beside us and, in faith, to be committing our lives and the lives of others into God’s ways, knowing that in going in God’s way lies our and their only hope. For we know, again to quote St Paul, that “nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God.”
Prayer then becomes my responsibility to be faithful to God, not God’s responsibility to fit my demands. Prayer is the day to day expression, in every moment and every situation, of “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”, a prayer made possible only because God is constantly and consistently engaged on earth.
Bishop John McIntyre
A new Christian Meditation group will begin on Tuesday 16 June at 7.00pm in the Meeting Room at St Paul’s.
Meditation is as natural to the spirit as breathing is to the body. Deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, it is an ancient spiritual discipline, a simple way into peace within oneself and union with the Spirit of Christ.
This is not to say that meditation is “the only way” to pray or the only way to wisdom. But meditation – silence, stillness and simplicity – does lead to the experience of wholeness that opens, in faith, to holiness.Holiness is the integration of wisdom and compassion applied to daily living. Because it is simple and yet calls for discipline this tradition advises the following simple practice:
- Choose a quiet place.
- Sit down comfortably, with your back straight.
- Close your eyes lightly.
- Sit as still as possible.
- Breathe deeply, staying both relaxed and alert.
- Slowly and interiorly, begin to say your mantra or prayer word. Listen to the word as you say it.
- Continue repeating it gently and faithfully for the whole time of the meditation.
- Return to it as soon as you realize you have stopped saying it.
- Stay with the same word during the meditation and from day to day
You don’t have to evaluate your meditation. The fruits will appear in your self and in your life and in all your relationships. Don’t be discouraged or disappointed by finding how distracted you are. That’s why we meditate, to go through the distractions. So there is no need to try to repress or blank out your thoughts or images. Just let them come and go but keep your attention on the mantra – the prayer word or sacred word.
The mantra we recommend is maranatha, an ancient Christian prayer from the language Jesus spoke, Aramaic. It means ‘Come Lord’. Repeat the word in four equal syllables, ma-ra-na-tha. Listen to the word as you say it and give it your full attention, but don’t think about its meaning. Distractions will come and go but don’t try to repress or fight them. Simply let them pass. When you do find that you have got distracted again, some thought or daydream has hooked your attention, simply return, in faith and love, to the word. This is what the Cloud of Unknowing calls the ‘work of the word’. Cassian taught to say the word in prosperity and in adversity”. Meditate twice a day, ideally in the early morning and early evening. The optimal length of time for meditation is thirty minutes, but you can begin with twenty and gradually increase to twenty five minutes or the full half hour. Be patient, simple and practice.
This is the verse that the mind should unceasingly cling to, until strengthened by saying it over and over again and repeating it continually, it renounces and lets go of all the riches of thought and imagination. Restricting itself to the poverty of this single verse it will come most easily to that first of the Gospel beatitudes: for he says: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ – John Cassian (c400AD), Conference 10:11
Once you have begun this as a simple daily practice, there are a few guidelines concerning your attitude to the experience that will help you to go deeper. First, don’t assess your progress. The feeling of failure – or success – may be the biggest distraction of all. Do not expect or look for ‘experiences’ in mediation. You don’t have to feel that anything should be happening. This may seem odd at first, because the experience of silence is so unfamiliar to most of us personally and so different from what we may think that prayer means.
And we are not used to being simple. The silence, stillness and simplicity, however, do have an ultimate purpose. In one of the parables of the Kingdom, Jesus compared the Kingdom to a seed that someone plants in the ground. The person then goes off to live an ordinary life while the seed grows silently in the earth ‘how he does not know’. The same thing happens to us, as the word is rooted evermore deeply in our hearts. And, as in the parable, there will in time be signs of growth. You will not always find them in your meditation itself, but in your life. You will begin to harvest the fruits of the spirit; you will find that you are growing in love. And if you ever stop the practice of meditation, whether for a day or a month or a year, simply return to it again with confidence in the infinite generosity of the Spirit that dwells in and among us all.
“One of the essential teachings I have taken from John Main and the Christian contemplative tradition that he has helped restore is the importance of a particular kind of stability or faithfulness in the daily practice of meditation. In being faithful to and with the mantra we are staying. That relates directly to what the Desert Fathers teach about stability. The whole practice of staying with the mantra and the discipline of meditating, the saying of the prayer “formula” makes most sense within the context of the kind of life the Desert Fathers talk about. That means a life where we are always trying to put our self-preoccupation and self-dramatizing, our compulsion to be in charge to one side.” (Rowan Williams, in Silence and Honey Cakes)
Further information on Christian Meditation can be found at the Australian Christian Meditation Community’s website, the World Community for Christian Meditation’s website, and at the Spiritual Solution website.
A talk by Laurence Freeman, leader of the World Community for Christian Medtiation, is available below.
