Taking a break from reading may not have been God’s plan today. I was loading some recycling in the car for a community recycling event in Evergreen tomorrow when I was suddenly plunged into darkness. Turns out that a major power station on the north end of the town had blown a fuse (or something like that) and plunged over 2500 households into dimness — it was, after all, mid-afternoon. Dorie Ann was working on an entry that will be posted here in the next day or so. Thank God for battery backups. We got the file saved and the computer shut down before her work was lost.
The outage lasted a bit under two hours and with little else to accomplish we retired to the upstairs where we had plenty of light. I picked up the second book in my studies, Ian Bradley’s Colonies of Heaven, and went back to work. Dorie Ann went to the dining room to work on a Christmas present she’s making for the parish. When the power returned, Dorie Ann decided that her writing muse had taken the rest of the day off and continued on her project and I came down to type more nearly illegible notes into more coherent form.
[Warning: in addition to the book listed above I also spent some time brushing up my biblical Greek, so there will be no respite from the “present active subjunctive” and other delights of New Testament mysteries when I return.]
I did not finish the book I’d been working on first as it was only really the first section that had provided the early inspiration for exploring parish-wide spiritual formation. Martin Thornton, the author of that work, was a fairly intense Anglo-Catholic who spent a good portion of his early ordained life in a religious community. We might find some of his ideas a bit rigid today, but along the line of “not reading naively” it’s not that difficult to sort out those ideas which can be applied to a 21st century congregation.
There was, however, one sentence that stood out, particularly coming from an Anglo-Catholic priest of his vintage. I will end today’s entry with that quote, but without further comment on it. I leave it for you few, brave readers of these entries to sort out what it might mean for us in being a parish church. Your comments would be welcome. And now, here it is:
“…Anglican theology insists that the creative channel of Grace in the world is not the priesthood but the church…”
The Apprentice Priest 