Spirit of the Eagle – April 2019

Spirit of the Eagle
St. John the Evangelist ACC

Spiritual Tidbits & Rector’s Reflections for
April 2019 from Father Tim

April is here with all its holy days. We start with Passion Sunday on the 7th. What exactly is ‘Holiness’ anyway? Holiness, or the holy, is something peculiar only to the sphere of religion. Holiness can happen at any given moment and is set apart from what we would deem rational. Holiness cannot be described or conveyed in words. So how can we understand Holiness? Truly we cannot, but we can experience it. We can suddenly sense Its presence in certain moments, and at certain places, both around us and even within us. Holiness cannot, strictly speaking, be taught. Within us It can only be evoked, that is awakened in our heart, our soul, and our mind. Holiness can erupt suddenly within us, this Wholly Other, as St. Augustine penned in his book Confessions: ‘What is that which gleams through me and smites my heart without wounding it? I am both a-shudder and a-glow. A-shudder, in so far as I am unlike it, a-glow in so far as I am like it.’ Our little parish will be very busy this month with holy services and celebrations. Invite friends and family to come and experience the Wholly Other with you. I pray this April you find yourself ‘in the Spirit’, both a-shudder and a-glow. ~ Father Tim

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I found no discipline in humanism; only a little intellectual discipline from a little study of philosophy. But the difficult discipline is the discipline and training of emotion; this the world has great need of, so great need that it hardly understands what the word means; and this I have found is only attainable through dogmatic religion. . . .Only those have the right to talk of discipline who have looked into the Abyss. ~ T.S. Eliot, Anglo-Catholic Laymen and Poet, excerpt from Religion without Humanism, 1930.

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Have you considered inviting someone to a Holy Week service? Do you have family members, or friends, who always have an excuse not to attend church? Could one of our many services this April help them experience holiness? The experience must come, not by demonstration, but by pure contemplation, which may help them begin their own personal pilgrimage which leads to the empty tomb. ~ Father Tim

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O that I could tell you what the heart feels, how it burns and is consumed inwardly! Only, I find no words to express it. I can but say: Might but one little drop of what I feel fall into Hell, Hell would be transformed into a Paradise. ~ St. Catherine of Genoa

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April Spirituality Class

In April we will be continuing our transitional class with both Spirituality and Bible Study. The class in April will cover, The Unforgiving Servant, Matthew 18: 21-35. The study of God’s word is central to the life and mission of our parish church of St. John the Evangelist. Please join us after Holy Mass on the 28th of April for an engaging, dynamic, and informative exploration of the Holy Scriptures. All are welcome, but be warned: continued exposure to God’s word will change your life.

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The prophet corresponds in the religious sphere to the creative artist in that of art: he is the man in whom the Spirit shows itself alike as the power to hear the ‘voice within’ and the power of divination, and in each case appears as a creative force. Yet the prophet does not represent the highest stage. We can think of a third, yet higher, beyond him, a stage of revelation as underivable from that of the prophet as was his from that of common men. We can look, beyond the prophet, to one in whom is found the Spirit in all its plenitude, and who at the same time in His person and in His performance is become most completely the object of divination, in whom Holiness is recognized apparent. Such a one is more than Prophet. He is the Son. ~ Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy

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St. John April Ordo Kalendar

Sunday, the 7th of April at 10:30 AM, Passion Sunday, Vestry meeting
Sunday, the 14th of April at 10:30 AM, Palm Sunday, Coffee Hour
Thursday, the 18th of April at 6:00 PM, Maundy Thursday Holy Mass & Stripping of the Altar
Friday, the 19th of April at 12:00 PM, Good Friday Liturgy & at 3:00 PM, Stations of the Cross
Saturday, the 20th of April at 6:00 PM, Easter Eve Service & Blessing of the New Fire
Sunday, the 21st of April at 10:30 AM, we celebrate Easter and the Resurrection
Sunday, the 28th of April 10:30 AM, we celebrate Easter I

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April Birthdays & Anniversaries

Brittany Sams – Birthday – April 13th
Ethan Whalen – Birthday – April 15th
Max Meadows – Birthday – April 20th
Carol Petrie – Birthday – April 22nd
Mike & Julie Murray – Anniversary – April 28

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…on his entrance into the Anglo-Catholic City churches, such as St. Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge — the fisherman’s church — of which John Betjeman writes: the whole district smells of fish, but inside the church there is the abrupt change to a smell of incense. . . There was its visual beauty, too, which Eliot commemorated in the midst of the squalor of Jazz-Age London: ‘where the walls of Magnus Martyr hold / Inexplicable spendour of Ionian white and gold’(in the third section of The Waste Land, 1922). Such beauty of holiness was deliberately cultivated in specifically Anglo-Catholic churches as the appropriate setting for the ‘Real Presence’ of the Lord as confected in the Mass and ‘reserved’ in the tabernacle. ~ Barry Spurr, Anglo-Catholic in Religion

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I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all countries. Even so then at the present time also there is a remnant. ~ Jeremiah 23:3; Romans 11:5

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The seeking of Jesus the Christ and the quest for chivalry combined lead directly to one place only: Anglo-Catholicism. Courage, honor, courtesy, justice, and a readiness to help and defend the weak and the poor. Welcome to the Anglican Catholic Church. ~ Father Timothy Butler