HERE'S WHAT'S HAPPENING AT ACC
**********
Worship and Preaching Schedule:
Sundays - August 29, 2010
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost - August 29, 2010
Jeremaih 32: 1-3a, 6-15
A FIELD OF HOPE
**********
WHAT'S HAPPENING THIS WEEK
Special activities are in italics; ongoing activities that happen weekly are in regular font.
| Sunday (8/29) |
8:45 am |
Adult Study Group |
| |
10:00 am |
Morning Worship and Youth Celebration |
| |
|
|
| Sunday (9/5) |
8:45 am |
Adult Study Group |
| |
10:00 am |
Morning Worship and Youth Celebration |
MEDITATION
(Used as Modern Testimony on Sunday, August 29)
From A Book of Hours
Thomas Merton
Let us suppose the message of a so-called contemplative to so-called persons of the world to be
something like this:
My dear sisters and brothers: can I tell you that I have found answers to the questions that
torment the people of our time?
I do not know that I have found answers. When I first became a monk, yes, I was more
sure of “answers.” But as I grow old in the monastic life and advance further into solitude,
I become aware that I have only begun to seek the questions. And what are the questions?
Can a person make sense of his or her existence? Can one honestly give one’s life meaning
merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell why the world began
and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for the good life? Perhaps in
my solitude I have become as it were an explorer for you, a searcher in realms which you
are not able to visit – except perhaps in the company of your psychiatrist. I have been
summoned to explore a desert area of the human heart in which explanations no longer
suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts. An arid, rocky dark land of
the soul, sometimes illuminated by strange fires which men and women fear and peopled
by specters which they studiously avoid except in their nightmares. And in this area I have
learned that one cannot truly know hope unless one has found out how like despair hope is.
The story of Christianity has said this for centuries in other less naked terms.
|