Dear Friends in Christ,
Context is everything! I am writing this pastoral letter on my first day back at regular work routine after a week-long retreat at St. Anselm’s Abbey. Since the abbey is on 60 wooded acres in the midst of a busy city, it was interesting, when Dave picked me up, to leave the peace, sanity and attentive focus on life of the monastery and drive into the maelstrom of traffic, noise, anger, hurry (to nowhere), and insane busyness that is D.C. I was reminded of these words of Carl Jung:
Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course
impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case
dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness
of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of
existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate
the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis
festinatio ex parte diaboli est–all haste is of the devil, as the old masters
used to say.
Parish churches are not Benedictine abbeys, but I like to think that they have, mutatis mutandis, a similar role. They are to be counter-cultural places of prayer, recollection, and focus on what life is really for in the midst of the insane clawing after power and money that secular life so often reduces life to. They are also to be places of hospitality, compassion, and community in our world of human moral meltdown.
I am thankful for Linda’s ministry among us–calling us to the life of spiritual growth. I am thankful for daily prayer and for Eucharist on the calendar days (not just Sundays) of the Church. When most of the Parish Council shows up for Evening Prayer before the Council meeting, I feel we have started the meeting in the right place.
I am thankful as well for all of you who help CTS be a place of mercy in a ruthless world: all you who work at Gaithersburg HELP, all who have delivered meals to homeless people during shelter week or via McKenna’s Wagon, or volunteered with SHARP, or purchased your coffee, tea, chocolate through Equal Exchange. Or one of the many other things we do here to manifest God’s love for a world gone mad.
We live in the world. We cannot stop the madness; indeed, in our workaday lives we participate in the madness, but isn’t it valuable, perhaps even “essential” is not too strong a word, that we have a place to come and remember that life is so much more? When we make our Eucharist, when we pray, study, do works of love, we sustain life’s meaning for the world’s sake.
There is much in the world that is good and positive. There are good people trying to do good things. The world is not just monochromatically evil. But as we get caught up in the pace of life and the struggle to survive, we can forget what life is really for. CTS, and every parish church everywhere, exists to remember, to be a place where people remember to be human.
Yours in Christ,
–Pastor Bastien
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