THOUGHTS, WRITINGS, RECORDINGS
from our priests
Artist and Art Therapist, Martha Loving Orgain
The Time Is At Hand, by Martha Loving Orgain
Now on display at the Christian Community
Paintings and Light & Darkness Charcoal work • The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily by Johann Wolfgang Goethe
By Artist and Art Therapist Martha Loving Orgain
Since 1991 I have been working artistically and therapeutically with the methods developed by Master Painter Liane Collot d’Herbois in Light, Color, and Darkness, based on the universal laws of nature. In the Collot work, one concentrates on Light and Darkness as a structure behind what one is painting. The form comes out of the color towards the last stages of the painting. The objective working of Light and Darkness is healing for the artist as well as for the viewer.
For 25+ years I have been working with Goethe's fairytale, a tale of transformation. When you work with it, somehow one begins to know you are IN the Great Mystery. Choosing this story, I worked in two assisted living facilities with elders with Alzheimer's and Dementia for one year, painting more than once on the same wet-on-wet paintings, repeating sections of the story. As I began telling the tale, one elder would pipe up about say, "She's talking about the Grim Reaper". And at the other facility, "She's talking about the death man." "And we're all going there." What is remarkable is that these elders would remember the story through visual memory of having watched me painting.
The veil painting, "The Time is at Hand" I can tell you came straight out of the Spiritual World. I had no preconceived idea of what forms would be in the painting. Usually, in the background, the goal was to paint the turquoise in the foreground. The turquoise is the coldest of all the colors and became the prison of the prince until the man with the lantern came. Biting her tail, the Green Snake holds the circle, as the prince hovers between the worlds.
In "Queen of the Sun on the Abyss" the queen bee and butterflies are on the precipice. We almost lost the Eagle as a result of DDT. Will we lose all the pollinators and insects and our blue-green planet? And all humanity?
Please help me continue to bring this work into the world by donating to my GoFundMe Campaign to build the tiny house mobile art studio:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/uaa3e-help-her-continue-to-help-others
Thank you for your interest in my work and I hope you enjoy the exhibition. For further information, sales, commissions, and educational opportunities please contact:
Martha Loving Orgain
martha@lovingcolor.org
(434) 865-5330
Living in Unsettling Times
"The world is violent and mercurial. It will have its way with you. WE are saved only by love...for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent, a writer, being a painter, being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love."
~ Tennessee Williams
If there is anything we could all agree on about the reality of living in these times it is that it is "unsettling." It is unsettling not to know really, how the virus spreads or which way it will go. It is unsettling to wear a mask in public and not to be able to see the countenance of a person. It is unsettling to realize how much we have neglected things: The environment, the children of the world, our individual transformation. It is unsettling not to have all the answers. It is unsettling to be homeless and to know that there are human beings who are homeless.
What is the spiritual purpose of all this unsettledness? In the Gospel reading today, (Luke 10) the disciples are sent ahead of Christ to shake people up, to cause a stir so that they can prepare themselves for the Kingdom of God in their midst. John the Baptist did the same with the announcement: "Change your heart and mind." We unsettle the earth before planting. We are unsettled inwardly before a performance, before taking a test, before giving a talk.
Perhaps the unsettling is preparation for the Spirit to be able to touch down and work in us. How impermeable we have become! These days we seem to need stronger and more catastrophic wake up calls to create openings in the heart and soul. Something new is trying to come about.
We can find alignment within ourselves, which becomes our guiding light. We cannot be divided, as the Kingdom of God is within us. So we cannot say we believe in the Divine and then freeze other human beings in false perceptions. We cannot allow ourselves to harden, or to become immoblie! We are called upon to act in the moment, with readiness and trust.
"Our part is to do what is right, moment by moment, and leave the rest for the future. To live out of pure trust, without any security in existence, trusting in the ever-present help of the spiritual world." ~ Rudolf Steiner
Rev. Carol Kelly
A letter from Rev. Kelly
Dear Community,
"The future is created out of that which, coming forth from the spiritual world, is guided by angels and archangels who bring fresh forces and possibilities to mankind. This can bring something new and surprising–something that has never been seen before and could never have been predicted."
~ Hans Werner Schroeder.
We are walking into a future with many uncertainties but we can find our ground and guiding force in our trust in the spiritual world. We are blessed to be able to come together to create Christ Community. This is the time to gather our forces! It doesn't mean much if you have trust when everything is going splendidly. This is the moment to say "yes" to creating something anew. In the words of David Whyte:
"The measure of our courage is the measure of our willingness to embrace disappointment, to turn towards it rather than away.....that there is no sincere path we can follow where we will not be fully and immeasurably let down and brought to earth, and where what initially looks like a betrayal, eventually puts real ground under our feet."
I am very glad to be here and I am ready to begin working together. I would like to hear from you. What are your ideas, imaginations, creative impulses for the coming year? What gifts would you like to bring to The Christian Community? What are your needs, wishes, hopes?
I have found great value in one-on-one conversations. Please feel free to set up a time with me to talk. I am living right now in the church and the yellow house, so you can find me easily. I know that it has been a difficult year and there may be those of you who need to resolve things in your own soul before you can be free to go forward. I am open to conversation or the Sacrament of Consultation to help with the healing process.
Looking forward to meeting you,
Sincerely,
Rev. Carol Kelly
a special request
Dear Congregation,
We are living in unusual times, which ask of us flexibility, patience, openness and benefit of the doubt in large doses. In our case, this comes down to the wish for every person who would like to attend the Act of Consecration to be able to do so without fear or anxiety.
Regardless of where you might stand on this issue, we are asking that you wear a mask in the chapel, on the porch and while visiting outside of the church out of consideration for those who would feel comforted by the added measure.
Please monitor yourselves carefully and choose to stay home if you have any symptoms of being unwell. I am also monitoring myself carefully and will be the exception and will not be wearing a mask while celebrating.
This too shall pass. It is an evolving situation. For now, let us do everything we can to allow everyone to attend the Service. We can be grateful that we can gather together and do not have to resort to "Zoom" church.
Looking forward to seeing you soon,
Rev. Carol Kelly
Sermon for St. John's Day
Mark 1: 1-11
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
As it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
“Behold, I send My messenger ahead of You,
Who will prepare Your way;
The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
‘Make ready the way of the Lord,
Make His paths straight.’”
John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism for a change of heart and mind, and for the forgiveness of sins. And all the country of Judea was going out to him, and all the people of Jerusalem; and they were being baptized by him in the Jordan River, confessing their sins. John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist, and his diet was hard fruits and wild honey. And he was preaching, and saying, “After me is coming One who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to bend down and untie the thong of His sandals. I baptized you with water; but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Immediately coming up out of the water, He saw the heavens opening, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon Him; and a voice came out of the heavens: “You are My beloved Son, in You I am revealed.”
Dear Community of Christians,
Today we celebrate the birthday of John the Baptist and ever a brand new festival month in the evolution of Christianity which bears his name. May John the Baptist inspire us to become more truly human. To become more truly human means to orient ourselves to God as free individuals living firmly on the earth.
And how shall we do this?
To prepare the way of the Lord, John spoke the word of annunciation, calling people out to the flowing waters. Going the ought the desert was of great help to him; for it awakened the clarity of the soul’s longing for new flowing life. In the desolation of our selfhood, we too experience this modern day desert, the dryness that awakens us to our own deepest thirst for more and truer life!
He called humanity to the waters to be baptized. We too are called to be baptized—and in the case of today’s humanity—to baptize ourselves.
Baptizing of old required a certain purification… a coming to zero, a reset, and an opening for something new. When John baptized, people were held under the waters until they reached a point of no return, a threshold experience (what we might also call a near death experience) which allowed them to reset and take hold of their lives anew. Today, we are having these threshold experiences all the time within our personal destinies. We go through individual experiences and also collective ones. Things have been intensifying and accelerating so that we do not have to seek out a temple for initiation, it will find us! Be it your marriage/partnership, raising or educating children, your work life, illnesses, or the intensified karma coming at us from the world…
But how we respond to it, is up to us, as never before. Freedom is the beginning place of the modern spiritual path of development.
Baptism for adults in our movement for religious renewal does not require a preparatory step of purification to take anything away, given from outside. Rather, it is a ritual of addition; to the life we are living, we add the step of baptizing ourselves so that we can choose over and over again to orient and align ourselves with the highest divinity, with the highest source of life and renewal. We use our own hand and bringing three fingers together, we lift our will to devoted action. Baptizing ourselves in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
When we baptize children, we do so at these three places on the body which represent the three archetypal soul forces: thinking, willing, feeling. As children are taking on their bodily existence and entering in, taking hold of this magnificent instrument which they will use to bring their heavenly gifts into the world, they receive a strengthening blessing through their baptism by receiving powerful archetypal earthly substances onto their bodies. It is at these places on forehead, chin and over the heart that as mature human beings we continue to baptize ourselves:
On the head, the place of thinking, the life giving water is brought in the form of the divine Trinity, the triangle pointing upwards, and we say: the Father God be in us;
On the chin, the place of the will, the all maintaining salt is brought in the symbol for the earth, the square, and we say: the Son God create in us;
Over the heart, the place of the feeling life, of love as a verb, the all renewing ash is brought in the form of a cross, and we say: the Spirit God enlighten us.
We baptize ourselves to depend our commitment to ourselves ever and again that in God we have our truest human being.
Yes, so be it!
Anti-racism Resources
This document is intended to serve as a resource to white people and parents to deepen our anti-racism work. If you haven’t engaged in anti-racism work in the past, start now. Feel free to circulate this document on social media and with your friends, family, and colleagues.