My Anglican Tradition class is winding down, and there are a couple more thoughts I want to share in the next couple of weeks. Here is one: In one of our class sessions we were asked to respond to the following statement: “The first purpose of our worship is to please our Lord and Savior, […]
My class readings this past week brought us through the “Great Schism” between Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity. This material was fascinating to me because Church history is not taught in the vast majority of evangelical churches (including the ones I’ve attended), and thus they seem to have little appreciation that for hundreds of years, […]
This past year, I became an Anglican. This is an oddity for me to say, because even though I have attended churches in other denominations for long stretches of time, never before have I suggested “I am a Presbyterian” or “I am a Baptist.” I would say that I am a Christian attending these denominational […]
Tonight I attended my first “Tenebrae” service, held at Resurrection’s mother church, Trinity Anglican in Marysville. Tenebrae is Latin for “into the shadows.” The service is intended to recreate the emotional aspects of Christ’s betrayal, abandonment, and the agony of his crucifixion. The heart of the service takes place toward the end, when candles are […]
“You hold my eyelids open;I am so troubled that I cannot speak.I consider the days of old,the years long ago.”—Psalm 77:4-5 In fall of 2015 I embarked on an eight month journey through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, which begins with an examination of sin. As I progressed through the weeks it felt as […]
Grief is a fickle thing. For the past few weeks I have felt the fog over mind and body lifting, at least at the corners. I still have some very dark days, but the light days have been brighter and more frequent. Then the holidays arrived. A nebulous gloom began to fall once my house […]
The last couple of mornings have been in the 30s so I’ve been building a fire in the wood stove instead of cranking up the heater. There’s something very cheery about a cozy fire heating my home as dawn creeps through the windows, plus it keeps my PG&E bill down. Out of necessity, I’m getting […]
Using the words of author Jerry Bridges, here’s the deal about using your imagination as you read Scripture. Bridges closed his last book (God Took Me by the Hand: A Story of God’s Unusual Providence, NavPress 2014; Jerry passed away earlier this month) with seven “spiritual lessons” he learned over the course of his life. […]
Welcome to my blog! Or to those of you who have read me in the past, welcome back! If you note the date of my last post you will see it was four months ago, almost to the day. Back in October, due to an automatic WordPress update, my website theme stopped working. So I […]
Recently I had a conversation with a friend over an article she found online that described some beliefs C.S. Lewis held that are contrary to standard evangelical beliefs. (The article mentioned that as an Anglican, Lewis believed in purgatory and praying for the dead, among other things. However I should point out that Anglican doctrine […]