Prayer Resource

On Monday Anglican leaders from the Global South will be gathering in Singapore. While there are many items on their agenda, including the pressing issues of religious persecution, poverty and HIV-AIDS, perhaps the most newsworthy item from our perspective will be a discussion as to how to respond to the recent direction of the Episcopal Church. Two Primates (senior archbishops) of the Anglican Communion have already written to the Archbishop of Canterbury requesting a special meeting of the Primates (with the Canadian and American Primates absent) to deal with the situation. Please pray for these godly leaders as they meet over the next week. A very helpful and informative prayer guide is available here.

Aside from offering valuable information and prayer requests for various provinces of the Anglican Communion, it includes some challenging quotations about prayer, for example:

The essence of prayer does not consist in asking God for something
but in opening our hearts to God, in speaking with Him,
and living with Him in perpetual communion.
Prayer is continual abandonment to God.
Prayer does not mean asking God for all kinds of things we want;
it is rather the desire for God Himself, the only Giver of Life.
Prayer is not asking, but union with God.
Prayer is not a painful effort to gain from God help
in the varying needs of our lives.
Prayer is the desire to possess God Himself, the Source of all life.
The true spirit of prayer does not consist in asking for blessings,
but in receiving Him who is the giver of all blessings,
and in living a life of fellowship with Him.

—Sadhu Sundar Singh

My only regret is that this is the only quote that originates in the Global South, when they have so much to teach us abvout prayer.

Faith Matters: Will Barbie Save The Episcopal Church?

Walter Russell Read questions the Episcopal Church’s attempts at “evangelism”…

… I think Anglican witness will continue in the United States. The future of the Episcopal Church is harder to predict. The looming expulsion from the Anglican Communion — a perfectly avoidable disaster which a competently led and effectively organized church could have avoided without sacrifice of principle — is likely to be a more deeply damaging blow than our befuddled leadership can quite grasp. There are many people in the pews who do not hold extreme theological views (either liberal or conservative) and have been shamed and grieved by the fecklessness and failure of their church for many years. They have endured the foppish incompetence and the self indulgent follies of the church bureaucracies and political establishment out of loyalty to a larger idea. Losing the bond with Canterbury will be a heavy blow for those hundreds of thousands of faithful Anglicans. If that wider identity and historical connection is lost, the disintegration of the remaining bits of the Episcopal church will perceptibly speed up. No branch can flourish cut off from the vine, and this particular Episcopal vine is already in trouble.

To look at the Episcopal church today and to love it and care about its future is to know what Jeremiah must have felt wandering the doomed streets of Jerusalem. The framework of the country was falling apart, the enemy was approaching and the inexorable doom stepped closer day by day. But inside the walls, the hypocrisy, folly, pretense and denial reigned on. Love of the city, rage at the rulers, sorrow and pity must have warred in his heart as he begged and pleaded that they turn, even now, to face the real horror of what they had done.

What a heritage we had, and what a waste we have made of it.

Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and one of the country’s leading students of American foreign policy. His father, Loren Mead, is an Episcopal priest in Washington, D.C. His entire article may be found here. It is well worth the read.

A Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury

… Your Grace, I have urged you in the past, and I will urge you again. There is an urgent need for a meeting of the Primates to continue sorting out the crisis that is before us, especially given the upcoming consecration of a Lesbian as Bishop in America. The Primates Meeting is the only Instrument that has been given authority to act, and it can act if you will call us together …

I have for some time been an admirer of Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda. He is a genuine leader in the Anglican Communion and is not afraid to speak the truth. You may find the full text of his letter here. (Click on it twice to get the full-sized text.)

Seven Stanzas at Easter

I intended to put this arresting poem by John Updike on my blog at Easter. Better late than never, I suppose—and it is still the Easter season. Christ is risen!

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules 

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers, 

each soft Spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled 

eyes of the eleven apostles;

it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart 

that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then 

regathered out of enduring Might 

new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping transcendence; 

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache, 

not a stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow

grinding of time will eclipse for each of us 

the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel, 

weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, 

opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen 

spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are

embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance.

© 1961 by John Updike (Written for a religious arts festival sponsored by the Clifton Lutheran Church, of Marblehead, Mass.)

London Times Sunday Cryptic for 11 April 2010

Here is this past Sunday’s London Times cryptic. Just click on it to come up with the full-sized version.

London Times Cryptic Solution for 4 April 2010

Here is my solution to last week’s puzzle (April 4):

Sunday Times Cryptic for 4 April 2010

Here is today’s cryptic from the London Times. I think you will find it more straightforward than last week’s.