Dear Friends,

This coming Tuesday, I will be headed to Austin, Texas, where the General Convention of the Episcopal Church will be meeting. Thomas Brown is one of the eight deputies of the Diocese of Massachusetts, so I will be joining him for part of the convention, which lasts for two weeks.

The General Convention meets triennially, and is the Church’s highest temporal authority. Among other things, it has power to amend the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church; to amend The Book of Common Prayer; and to carry out various other responsibilities and authority. There are two legislative Houses of General Convention: the House of Deputies, made up of an equal number of clergy and laity, and the House of Bishops.

As with any legislative body, the work of General Convention is complicated. Legislative committees meet, resolutions are considered, revised, sometimes adopted and sometimes rejected. In a time when many governing institutions are being attacked, there are those who criticize the structures of the larger church as being ineffective or unwieldy.

And yet, if Jesus promised that where two or three are gathered in his name he is there, then the Church believes that even when over a thousand are gathered in one convention center in his name, he will be there as well.

I invite you to remember in your prayers all who are gathered for the 78th General Convention, meeting during the first two weeks of July.  Pray that they will hear the Spirit, see God’s beauty, and act in love, even as we seek to do so in this place.

Faithfully,

Tom

You can find out more about General Convention here.

“In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.”       Mark: 1:35

Dear Friends,

More than once in the gospels, we are told that Jesus went away to a quiet  and deserted place to pray.

This week, I was fortunate enough to spend two days on retreat at Emery House, a retreat center of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in West Newbury.  It is certainly not a deserted place.  I had the opportunity to meet with one of the monks there for conversation, and other monks and guests were in residence. But it was a quiet place, as it was a silent retreat. This meant not only refraining from conversation with other guests and monks (all the meals are taken in silence) but also stepping back from the many other conversations that occupy much of my mind during the day. To step back from the 24 hour newsfeeds, the emails, and all that the internet has to offer was, I admit, a challenge but also a great blessing.

To choose to step away from all of that is not a process of putting one’s head in the sand, but rather an opportunity to listen more closely to the most important conversation of any one of our lives -the conversation that God is having with us. Two days seemed hardly enough to remind me of the vital importance of that conversation, as I seek to address the challenges that confront our communities, our nation in this time, and the world. But oh, it was a start!

The theologian Karl Barth once wrote that we should read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. That is good advice. But every once in awhile, it is ok to put down the newspaper, and engage more deeply in the conversation that God is having with us those quiet places. In the silence, we discover that such places are anything but deserted. They are filled with the presence of God.

Faithfully,

Tom

PS – Retreats such as the one I was on are by no means limited to clergy. If you would like to learn more about retreat opportunities, either at Emery House or at the brothers’ monastery in Cambridge, please speak to me.