Dear ones in Christ,
Every year we gather at the Chapel and mark the turning of a year and our arrival back to a place that gives us joy and connects us with our past and our present. We walk in the garden, sit in a pew, converse with friends or those who may soon to be friends. We ponder our life in silence before God. We break into joyful melody. We open our selves to prayer. We offer the energy of hope to one another or to ourselves as we linger over the sacred stories of scripture, draw our lives into them and out again.
Sometimes we are like a chickling waiting for eternal food to be dropped in our mouths, to nourish our being. Sometimes we might be like the child who fears the taste of something as he locks his jaw. And, yet the sacred word finds its way in, and we are restored where we did not know we had a need. We share of our bounty that other lives may be enriched.
We draw ourselves here, together, building a community of compassion, passing it on to our young. Perhaps we sit with another’s grief or enter their joy before God, God in us and God beyond us. Here we are reconnected to the needs of the world and reconnect to the wisdom that we are Christ’s hands outstretched to care, to nourish, to feed.
In his poem, “Sunflowers in Babylon,” Joshua Luke Smith pens these words,
"Are we not standing in the garden of our forefathers?
Are we not reaping a harvest we didn't sow?
Are we not leaning on the limbs of an oak, and standing within the shade of a forest that someone else chose to grow?"
Thus are we welcomed to the Chapel, whose purpose is to connect us season by season, not primarily to a past legacy, a garden of someone else’s planting, but rather to plant an oak of compassion within us. His compassion moves us outward and toward one another. We learn Christ in what we then do. The Chapel’s vocation is to place the word of God alongside our life and bid us grow together, heal and serve.
Whether you are new to the Chapel or have long come here, may you find both nourishment for your soul, the opportunity to connect to others and pathways by which you may serve.
In Christ’s love,
