Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Cuba bound

A top the church in Cardenas, Cuba where we will be staying 5 nights
Saturday 18 Episcopalians from New Hampshire, 13 of us from Christ Church, arrive in Cuba for a one-week mission trip. Our purpose is to transport in our luggage medicine, other donations along with four water filtration systems. The trip has been in the works since our return last January from our first trip.

This is an important moment in the life of Cuba when there is uncertainty about whether the new openings from the U.S. will bring about real change in the lives of the people. I will be interested to see if there will be any noticeable difference in the hopes of the people we will meet.

I will be preaching in Spanish on Sunday at St. Francis church, where my son Will spent his Y.A.S.C. year. After five days in Cardenas we travel to Havana for the final two days. 

We invite your prayers for our safety and the success of this mission to be present with a people long isolated and living under difficult circumstances.  

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Quoted Richard Rohr in Sermon of March 8, 2015


Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
The Path of Descent
Stumbling and Falling
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Sooner or later, if you are on any classic “spiritual schedule,” some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply cannot deal with, using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be, you must be, led to the edge of your own private resources. At that point, you will stumble over a necessary stumbling stone, as Isaiah calls it (Isaiah 8:14). You will and you must “lose” at something. This is the only way that Life-Fate-God-Grace-Mystery can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey.
We must stumble and fall, I am sorry to say. We must be out of the driver’s seat for a while, or we will never learn how to give up control to the Real Guide. It is the necessary pattern. Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan, and find it to be insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream. Alcoholics Anonymous calls it the Higher Power. Jesus calls this Ultimate Source the “living water” at the bottom of the well (John 4:10-14).
The Gospel was able to accept that life is tragic, but then graciously added that we can survive and will even grow from this tragedy. This is the great turnaround! It all depends on whether we are willing to see down as up; or as Jung put it, that “where you stumble and fall, there you find pure gold.” Lady Julian of Norwich said it even more poetically: “First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!”