Letter from Our Minister
Letter from Rev. J. Carr Holland III
Summer 2023
This Chapel is a place where generations have gathered to be grounded in the Christian faith. Here among the joys and challenges of family and the care of friendships, during vacation’s ease, we touch the deep rhythms of life. We come here to restore, perhaps to heal, to taste peace, to love each other in the ways that summers allow. The rugged work-a-day world can be a little more distant here.
The Chapel and its grounds sit as a reminder that there is a Godly life that seeks to find occupancy within us. Here we reorient ourselves to God whom we know best in Jesus Christ. Here we are reminded that every act of care finds its roots in the core Christian experience and that the energy we call love originates in God, who desires our cooperation, creativity, loyalty. Every kind deed we muster is its child, a sort of prayer of gratitude, tapping us into God’s dream for us. Our worship offered variously – on the beach, in the cool of the Chapel, on Thursday mornings in the garden - accepts our pause and informs our conscience and hope. The columbarium walls pepper us with names of those who have followed this way of return. Children’s voices in the Chapel programs speak of the present and future praise of God’s goodness. All of us seek to live lives of resurrection beauty, lives that rise above divisions and seek harmony in holy goodness.
The Chapel is not so much a building or a garden. It is a people with an Easter orientation of life. In a world often peppered with disconcerting malice, we seek here a deep unity in the call of God to tend love, to seek and give forgiveness, to rise to our better selves as God has designed us, to lovingly serve one another following the pattern of Christ’s love. Here we open ourselves to be restored to God’s intended beauty. This is the joy that calls out to us from this sacred space so lovingly tended at the heart of this village.
As you read this newsletter, you will find times to worship, opportunities to share fellowship, ways to be intellectually nourished, avenues of reaching out to offer and to receive loving care.
Please join us in worship, on the beach, in the Chapel or in the garden. Join in educating our children in the ways of faith and loving service. Support our life with your life. Through your giving and service, remember those whose economic or healing needs are very real on this Island. Find the rise in your heart/mind that is the Easter orientation of life!
Welcome to this Sconset season grounded in this sacred space.
The Reveren J. Carr Holland III
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