Landscapes
Only a few more days before I am back one hundred feet from my beloved Rappahannock River and all of you. My heart after such a whirlwind couple of weeks is turned in that direction although this week among my Living School friends will be very special.
Last night I traveled back through pictures I and others have taken during this time away from home as I have traveled in multiple time zones and in environments very different from back home. What a journey. A lot of stories to share.
This trip has been about spending time with special people in my life, but as I travel through the pictures of this time away I am struck by how much the landscapes have been the prominent focus. So varied, so different from my usual frame of reference. Perhaps that’s one of the main reasons we travel: to experience ourselves in different places, different time zones with some unconscious expectation to come home in some way refreshed, renewed, as if new landscapes will call something fresh and new to arise within us. Perhaps to help us see something in and about ourselves we have forgotten or hadn’t seen before.
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A special day in Seattle early on, absorbed in the Chihuly museum and garden exhibit that morning then wandering that afternoon through the Seattle aquarium among sea life in living form that obviously had inspired the glass blowing genius of the morning’s artist. Standing in the middle of an Alaskan rainforest a few days later watching thousands of salmon milling about a broad stream, home again where they had been birthed now returning to birth the next generation. An eagle there “buzzing” our little group only a few feet overhead, then perching on a dead tree trunk astoundingly close as if to demand a photo op. “or else." Cruising within a few hundred feet of the Margerie Glacier towering two hundred feet in the air above the icy water surface beneath which another two hundred feet of ice completed its face. Receding before our very eyes as fragments are “calving” off due to climate change. The next day and a hundred miles further, flying with five others in a small seaplane into another primeval but continually changing landscape in Alaskan fjord country. Landing in the middle of a lake 650 feet deep, standing precariously on one of the plane’s pontoons, rocking to the rhythm of the lake’s whipped wind surface, wondering what the hidden wildlife inhabitants thought of the strange metal bird that was disturbing the surface of their world. We humans were absolutely silent in awe of the primal Presence that seemed to hold us close.
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Our souls need such primal beauty. At least mine does. To remind me of the timeless yet ever changing nature of a creation that is so incredibly sustaining, vital, enduring. Creation offers its embrace to us in a rhythm that we humans seem to sense more fully through a veil that lifts only when we stop, are still and let ourselves be drawn in to the stunning wholeness of the peace that emerges when we humble ourselves to the Presence flowing through seeking to connect and renew us.
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This past Sunday I spent the morning in St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle for a service of Holy Communion and their Forum following the service. The cathedral was built in the early twentieth century, but is a stunning, startling contemporary, towering space of stone, steel, glass and metal architecture. A huge circular clear glass window, like the clear pupil of some heavenly eye, dominates the interior’s landscape. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it; its design was powerful. As I see it in my eye’s mind this morning I am struck by how it seemed to resemble the lens of a gigantic camera. As if some immense Presence was focusing its eyes, its lens on those of us gathered within.
At the forum following the service The Rt. Rev. Katharine Jeffrets Schori, former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, presented and fielded questions from those gathered to hear her. Her tenure as presiding bishop had been frought with division, dissent, distrust as the changing landscape of church and society experienced exceedingly rough waters. This Sunday, it was the end of a long week in which the tragic human violence of El Paso and Ohio shootings dominated the news and our human landscape. Bishop Katherine was a calm, compassionate presence but presented as troubled as we all were in the face of what appears to be escalating violence and disturbance in our human landscapes. I lament in the words of an old tune, “When will we ever learn?”
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I think of the eyes of Jesus Christ over the altar of St. John’s in a little rural town named Warsaw in Virginia. I remember the gigantic lens over the altar of St. Mark’s Cathedral. I ponder the look in the eyes of the eagle in the rainforest in Alaska. What happens when we look back into all those eyes and ponder our place as humans in the nature of things? In what landscape of the soul does our spirit reside? What must we face and learn to both survive and thrive together as we are called to live, move and have being together with each other and in resonance with the Creation of which we are a part? I wonder.
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Torrence
Eagle photograph by Torre Hinnant
St. John's stained glass window photograph by Anne Neuman.
All other photographs by Torrence Harman.
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Link
to Bishop Susan's Reflection on the Mass Shootings in El Paso and Dayton
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This Sunday is a
Celtic Morning Prayer
service at Farnham. I am really looking forward to being with all of you again, and especially after my time away and for this special service.
Torrence
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September 27
th
- 29
th
Parish Shrine Mont Retreat
“Caring for God’s Creation in a Celtic Way.”
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October 29
th
, 30
th
and 31
st
John Philip Newell's
School of Celtic Consciousness
-
a three day event at Grace Episcopal Church, Kilmarnock
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Crab Basket Raffle
St. John’s ECW
is holding a raffle with proceeds going to a scholarship fund to send children to camp. The prize is one
bushel of steamed crabs
(donated by Faunce Seafood) plus crab-related items. The drawing will be at St. John’s on
Sunday, August 18
th
, 2019
and you need not be present to win. Tickets are on sale, now; ask any member of St. John’s ECW!
Price:
1 for
$5.00
or
5 for $20.00
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you might have to click on the heron icon in the link once it opens.
Torrence's column,
"Faith Matters"
is on page 5 this month.
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Summer Speaker Series event at St. John's Wellford Hall- 6 p.m. social, 6:30 covered dish supper, 7 p.m. speaker Michelle Brumfield
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Volunteer requests
click
to see the
Volunteer Newsletter,
with staff updates.
September 13th & 14th
fundraiser and garden tour
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Saturday Sept.21
s
t
Low Country Boil
from 5 - 8 p.m.
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and tour of the house & gardens at Woodford to benefit the
Richmond County Museum. Tickets are $60 each
or 2 for $100.
contact
Becky Marks (804) 394-3102 or Sandy Garretson (804) 394-3606
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Sunday August 11
th
Morning Prayer
Celtic Service
Joint Congregation service
10:00
a.m. at
Farnham
no service at St. John's
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Sunday August 18
th
Holy Eucharist
Joint Congregation service
10:00
a.m.
at St. John's
no service at Farnham
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Sunday August 25
th
Morning Prayer
Joint Congregational service
10:00 a.m. at Farnham
no service at St. John's
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Sunday Sept 2
nd
Holy Eucharist &
Baptism
Joint Congregational service
10:00 a.m. at St. John's
no service at Farnham
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Come Worship With Us
Sunday Service this week
10:00 a.m. St. John's Church
Warsaw, VA
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