Letters from 18
to 24 August 2008
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And with thy spirit?
Thank you for this week's opening
page. It is the most profound that
I have read on these pages. We gather at our parish in much the same way you describe. Yet we all also enjoy going to churches
with different customaries. The expression of the faith within Anglicanism is glorious at best, and just a little less so at
worst...Aren't we fortunate and blessed?
Fr. Van Windsor
Trinity Episcopal Church
Pine Bluff, Arkansas, USA
waltwindsor@aol.com
18 August 2008
So many ways to be a participant
I read your lead
page of the 17th with great interest and joy! Since
my first “high church” experience over forty years ago I have found such liturgical expression to be a truly wonderful
experience. As a lifelong Lutheran, participatory liturgy is for me more the norm. I find that an occasional (or frequent) dose
of “good church”, as a priest friend calls it, does indeed help focus on the majesty of what we do in our worship.
When my Lutheran friends say they don’t care for it because they aren’t “doing anything” I simply remind
them that what they are to “do” is to allow the liturgy to envelop them, to allow themselves to soar with the music
and incense, if only for a brief time, deeper into the mystery and joy of our worship!
Thank you for all of your insights!
Lyle Clark
Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity, Saranac Lake, NY
Tupper Lake, New York, USA
lyleclark@verizon.net
21 August 2008
Guy in the sky?
An editorial in New Scientist magazine noted that 'Intelligence
isn't all it's cracked up to be'.
Why are so many intelligent science people still handicapped by their
model for God as “The Capricious, Great Big Supernatural Guy in the Sky?” It is easy to create pictures of such
gods by accepting that when they died they overcame Entropy by achieving eternal life among the stars. Look at the constellation
Orion. Definitely follows this model when you consider that people worshipped Orion as Osiris, the God of the Dead. When they
saw Orion rising in the eastern sky, they saw this as a symbol for all the dead rising back to life.
When we comprehend the new model for God as the process which continually
brings the universe into existence whenever it is observed, we now have a mind-blowing, awesome model for a God. A God who lives
in us. Each one of us is capable of bringing the entire universe into existence when we observe it. We also have a process that
demonstrates that the toughest problems can be solved through the random evolution or self-organisation of what is now our natural
system. Engineers are now finding out that by tapping into their intuitive thoughts, what the ancients called the voice of God,
they really can create the best answers possible to their problems.
As modern people are demonstrating, the really intelligent are not
limited by worrying about the limits of their intelligence. The more we observe the workings of the human mind, we really must
conclude that an ineffable intelligence is responsible for creating the system that discovered its own answer to the problem
of people living in this beautiful but very dangerous world. This system created the human mind.
Malcolm Oliver
St Lukes Tinonee
Old Bar 2430 New South Wales, AUSTRALIA
relience@midcoast.com.au
22 August 2008
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