Rector’s Annual Reports
The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2008 have been uploaded as pdf documents and can be accessed via this page.
Day: March 18, 2009
Prayer Is Our Life: Lenten Meditation
Prayer Is Our Life
Fr. David Curry
Rumours of Lent swirl about in the snow-mist of the Valley and dance in the beams of the mid-winter’s sun. What I am about to say concerns the season of Lent but in its larger dimension. It concerns the Lent that is our lives, our lives in pilgrimage. I want to say something about prayer and a rule of life.
We all have, I suspect, too narrow a view of prayer and, as a consequence, too narrow a view of Christian life. The consequences of such narrowness are deadly. Where religion is reduced to simply an optional aspect of life, it ceases to be religion. Where prayer appears as simply an item in the smorgasbord of optional religious activity, it ceases to be prayer. To the contrary, religion is life essential and prayer is its necessity. The recovery of a sense of the necessity of prayer means the rediscovery of our essential selves in the very life of God himself.
We are to be a people of prayer. That is to be taken, I think, in the most radical sense as meaning a people who are defined by prayer, a people whose lives simply are prayer. How can this be? (more…)
Sermon for the Feast of St. Patrick
The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon for the Feast of St. Patrick.
“The people which sat in darkness have seen a great light”
The Gospel (Matthew 4. 13-24, BCP., 315, Propers of a Missionary) says nothing about shillelaghs, shamrocks or even about snakes, let alone green beer! It does say something about places “upon the sea-coast”, about the preaching of Christ seen as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy of light coming to “the people which sat in darkness” and in the “shadow of death”, about repentance, about discipleship, and about healing and salvation; in short, about all the things that belong to the evangelium – the good news that is the meaning of the word, gospel.
And the lesson, too, (Acts 12.24-13.5) underscores the same theme. “The word of God grew and multiplied,” meaning what, exactly? (more…)