HERE'S WHAT'S HAPPENING AT ACC

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                         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

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                         WHAT'S HAPPENING THIS WEEK

Special activities are in italics; ongoing activities that happen weekly are in regular font.

                                                 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.