Christ Church - (Anglican) Windsor, Nova Scotia

13 November 202614 November 2026Anglican issues, Statements and other writings, Theology

Notes on the Catechism, Part 3

Notes on Fr. Plant’s King Oswald’s Heirs:
Meditations on the Catechism of the English Church,
3rd Session, Chapters 22 – 40, November 12^th, 2026

Intro: Fr. Plant’s book begins and ends with the image of trees, Oswald’s tree and its association with trees in other traditions, but primarily in the Scriptures with the Cross of Christ in the New Testament and the Trees of Life and Knowledge in Genesis. In a way the whole biblical story, he seems to suggest, is captured in the symbolism of trees. I want to begin our ending of his treatment of the Catechism with some tree references found in George Herbert’s poems which, I think complement Fr. Plant’s splendid and helpful reflections. The second stanza of Herbert’s poem “Easter” comes to mind.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His wretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Then in his poem “The Crosse”, he speaks of it as “this strange and uncouth thing … to make me sigh, and seek, and faint and die, / until I had some place , where I might sing, / And serve thee. “ Somehow we have to learn how to hold these different moments together, the things of suffering and the things of joy.

Chapter 22: My Heart At Liberty. This chapter considers God’s Commandments but from the consideration of law as freedom and not as coercion to arbitrary and random demands. He does not, however, take us through the (so-called – they aren’t exactly numbered) ten commandments but alludes to them as “the shape of reality itself”. They belong to our freedom, our being freed to the law which details the essential features of our relation to God himself and through God to our lives with one another; in short, love of God and Neighbour are inseparable and are a strong affirmation of life and truth. This can be complemented by seeing the Commandments not as a list – hence something arbitrary and disconnected – but as comprehensive, interdependent, and complete. Because God is God, we might say, everything else follows in an orderly fashion. The Ten Commandments, for example, are themselves an expression of natural law or reason here given authoritatively by God. But it is not simply that they are commanded by God, the quis of ‘who said’ but rather the quid, reflection on what is said. This is crucial and important; in short, their content and orderly interrelationship belongs to the relation between intellect and will in God, and in us. The false separation of intellect and will is a constant theme in Fr. Plant’s argument.

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13 November 20267 November 2026Prayers and liturgy

Charles Simeon, Pastor

The collect for today, the commemoration of Charles Simeon (1759-1836), Priest, Evangelical Divine (source):

O loving God, who orderest all things by thine unerring wisdom and unbounded love: Grant us in all things to see thy hand; that, following the example and teaching of thy servant Charles Simeon, we may walk with Christ in all simplicity, and serve thee with a quiet and contented mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: Romans 10:8b-17
The Gospel: St. John 21:15-19

Charles Simeon served as vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge, from 1782 until his death. His zealous evangelical preaching was bitterly opposed by parish leaders, but proved immensely popular and influential among Cambridge undergraduates. He supported the British and Foreign Bible Society and helped to found the Church Missionary Society. His curate Henry Martyn became chaplain of the East India Company and one of India’s best-known missionaries.

Historian Lord Macaulay wrote of him, “If you knew what his authority and influence were, and how they extended from Cambridge to the most remote corners of England, you would allow that his real sway in the Church was far greater than that of any primate.”

A meditation on the life of Charles Simeon, by John Piper, is posted here.

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11 November 20267 November 2026Prayers and liturgy

Remembrance Day

A prayer of The Very Rev’d Eric Milner-White (1884-1963), Dean of York Minster:

O Lord our God, whose name only is excellent and thy praise above heaven and earth: We give thee high praise and hearty thanks for all those who counted not their lives dear unto themselves but laid them down for their friends; beseeching thee to give them a part and a lot in those good things which thou has prepared for all those whose names are written in the Book of Life; and grant to us, that having them always in remembrance, we may imitate their faithfulness and with them inherit the new name which thou has promised to them that overcome; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Source: Give Us Grace: An Anthology of Anglican Prayers, compiled by Christopher L. Webber. Anglican Book Centre, Toronto, 2004.

This memorial tablet to the British Empire dead of the First World War was unveiled in the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula, Brussels, on 27 July 1927. Photograph taken by admin, 14 October 2014.

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11 November 20267 November 2026Prayers and liturgy

Martin of Tours

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Martin (c. 316-397), Monk, Bishop of Tours (source):

Lord God of hosts, who didst clothe thy servant Martin the soldier with the spirit of sacrifice, and didst set him as a bishop in thy Church to be a defender of the catholic faith: Give us grace to follow in his holy steps, that at the last we may be found clothed with righteousness in the dwellings of peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Isaiah 58:6-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 25:34-40

One of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages, Martin was born to pagan parents and, although intending to become a Christian, followed his father into the Roman army. About three years later, in Amiens, France, came the famous incident portrayed in the artwork seen here.

On a cold winter day, he met a beggar at the city gates. Drawing his sword, he cut his military cloak in two and gave half to the man. In a dream that night, he saw Christ wearing the half-cloak he had given away and saying, “Martin, yet a catechumen, has covered me with his garment”. Martin was baptised shortly thereafter.

After being discharged from the army, he met St. Hilary at Poitiers upon the latter’s return from exile in 360. Hilary provided a piece of land where Martin founded the first monastic community in Gaul. He lived there for ten years until 371, when he reluctantly accepted a call from the people of Tours to become their bishop.

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8 November 20268 November 2026Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Octave of All Saints’ Day

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Octave of All Saints’ Day.

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8 November 20268 November 2026Sermons

Sermon for the Octave of All Saints’ Day

“They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”

Mercy is not only at the center of the Beatitudes; it underlies and shapes all the Beatitudes from beginning to end. The truth and dignity of our humanity is found in blessedness, especially the blessedness of suffering, as we explored last Sunday, paradoxically as that seems. Yet that is the more transcendent form of blessedness that belongs to the good of our humanity in the immediacy and immanence of the divine found in human experience but only as its corrective and its redemption. The unity of the communion of saints is ultimately grounded in the unity of God. “I and the Father are one,” Jesus says. Thus, the Beatitudes provide a way to think about the difficult things of suffering, like persecution and loss without being defined by them, and even to things like war and its atrocities. These are the things that Remembrance Day properly concerns and which should concern us. It is certainly not about the glorification of war.

Beginning in the mid-11^th century in western Christianity, The Festival of All Saints was followed by The Solemnity of All Souls. The remembering of all the faithful departed and of human mortality is embraced within the Communion of Saints. “These all died in faith,” Hebrews tells us and speaks explicitly of those who suffered (Heb. 11. 32-37), even those “of whom the world was not worthy” (vs. 38) who are understood to be enrolled in that so “great a cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12, 1) which concludes the Epistle. It signifies the hope of “a sea-change into something rich and strange” (Shakespeare, The Tempest). All Souls’ was part of the Cluniac Reform of the Benedictine order initiated by Abbot Odilo of Cluny (c. 962-1048). The thread of glory runs through the grave of our common mortality. It became, more or less, universally observed in the West by the 13^th century and, perhaps, inspired such deeply reflective hymns like Dies Irae (1260) “Day of wrath, O day of mourning” on the theme of judgement and death sung in Advent and at requiems.

For our contemporary world, these ways of thinking have been associated with Remembrance Day, ever since November 11^th, 1918, the end of the First World War. Remembrance Day is really a secular form of All Souls’ Day. We gather at cenotaphs, the empty tombs, in our communities where the names are written of those who left our communities, our churches, our schools, and went off to the ‘great wars’ that have had such a profound and devastating effect upon our contemporary world. They didn’t return. That is the point. Our Maritime communities are defined in no small measure by the immensity of their sacrifice, a sacrifice in the sense of commitment to what they thought was significant and worth dying for, to some extent or another, in all of the confused mixture of motives and intent that belonged to the forms of cultural and communal identities. It was not about the later abstractions of democracy and freedom. To read the names at the Windsor cenotaph is to be reminded of all the little places in Hants County from which they came and to realize in a moment how entire generations were wiped out; a legacy of loss that has affected those communities to this day.

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8 November 20267 November 2026Events, Month at a Glance

Month at a Glance, November

Sunday, November 8th, Octave Day of All Saints / Trinity 23
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, November 10th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Wednesday, November 11th, Remembrance Day
11:00am Windsor Cenotaph (KES Cenotaph following)

Thursday, November 12th
7:00pm Seminar on the Catechism, King Oswald’s Heirs # 3, Ch. 22-Ch. 40, Coronation Room, Parish Hall.

Saturday, November 14th
4:30-6:00pm Ham Supper, Parish Hall

Sunday, November 15th, Trinity 24
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, November 17th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Adam Kirsch’s The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature (2016) & Robert Calasso’s The Book of All Books (2019) trans. from the Italian, Tim Parks, (2021).

Saturday, November 21st
9:00am-4:00pm Quiet Day (WORCs)

Sunday, November 22nd, Sunday Next Before Advent
8:00pm Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
(Followed by Time of Refreshment & Fellowship, Hall)

Sunday, November 29th, First Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Monday, November 30th, St. Andrew
7:00pm Holy Communion

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8 November 20265 November 2026Prayers and liturgy

The Twenty-Third Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, our refuge and strength, who art the author of all godliness: Be ready, we beseech thee, to hear the devout prayers of thy Church; and grant that those things which we ask faithfully we may obtain effectually; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Philippians 3:17-21
The Gospel: St Matthew 22:15-22

Artwork: Jacek Malczewski, The Tribute Money, 1908. Oil on canvas, National Museum, Poznan, Poland.

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7 November 20264 November 2026Prayers and liturgy

Willibrord, Missionary and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Willibrord (658-739), Archbishop of Utrecht, Apostle to the Frisians, Patron Saint of the Netherlands (source):

O Lord our God, who dost call whom thou willest and send them whither thou choosest: We thank thee for sending thy servant Willibrord to be an apostle to the Low Countries, to turn them from the worship of idols to serve thee, the living God; and we entreat thee to preserve us from the temptation to exchange the perfect freedom of thy service for servitude to false gods and to idols of our own devising; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.