Young Adult Conference • starts Dec 30

CALL AND RESPONSE: THE WORLD WE ARE CREATING
Three days of conversation, contemplation, and activity around questions about Responsibility as we enter into a new year. What is our responsibility to ourselves, to our community, and ultimately to the spiritual world?

For young adults aged 19–30 • DEC. 3O, 2021 – JAN. 2, 2022

Featuring local artists, thinkers, and priests of the Hudson Valley area.

With a talk by Charles Eisenstein • January 2, 2022

REGISTER

The Christmas Fair was a GREAT success!

Thank you to everyone who helped to create such a beautiful community event!

The SILENT AUCTION continues all this week and ends on Sunday after church at 12:15. SO, please come and bid on your favorite items this week only! There are also more lovely things for sale, books, and angel candles.

Special Thank You
Andrea Pennington, Ruth Blair, Carrie Roe, Laura Geilen, Avery Sumner, Shawn Grider, Emory Grider, "Dressed Like Dads", Aurica Mundi, Kevin Mullaney, Laurie Portocarrero, Terry Mullen, and ALL OF YOU!!

Advent II — The Plant Kingdom

Poems without Words

There are poems
That are never written,
That simply move across
The mind
Like skywriting
On a still day.
Slowly the first word
Drifts west,
The last letters dissolve
On the tongue,
And what is left
Is the pure blue
Of insight, without cloud
Or comfort.

By Linda Pastan

Of the Divine Feminine, we were all conceived and born into this world of earth. The world and all that exists, mineral, plant, animal, and human have been born and created out of wisdom. 

We all have access to the Divine Feminine. We are in her and of her. Yet, she is invisible and elusive.

Advent brings us closer to this mystery. The mood that we cultivate, the quiet, the stillness, the darkness, all lead us to the path we must follow.  Ah, but she is silent…

Consider the rose; penetrating into the earth with its roots,  bringing earth along with it into its woody stem, drawing up in spirals, putting out thorns to ward off the enemy and then bursting into the most unlikely surprise!  The rose blossom is unimaginable. In its exquisite beauty and form it is a manifestation of Divine Wisdom. It is a transformation of earthly substance into something that is almost super-earthly. The rose petal and its fragrance are as close to heaven as possible in the material world.

How was the rose first conceived before it was a rose? It was an immaculate conception out of the Holy Spirit into earthly being.

How did the birth of Jesus upon earth come about?

It was an immaculate conception out of the Holy Spirit into earthly being. 

How does the Holy Spirit work now? What is it that wants to be born into this world that we are to conceive of and bear and nurture? How can the Holy Spirit work through us?

This is the call of preparation, of Advent. We are called to purify our souls so that we can receive what the Holy Spirit wants to bring to us. We are to create the space, like writing a poem and then letting it go, so that all that is left is “the pure blue of insight” and the warm-heartedness, courage, and goodwill to act on it. 

We can return again and again where we left off. That is not the same as “starting over.” Pick it up and allow yourself to find a new and higher place. 

It is time to conceive of the world differently.

Sermon by Rev. Carol Kelly

Advent I — The Mineral Kingdom

We are the only Spiritual Beings who are allowed to experience stone, the hardening of earthly matter, the mineral kingdom. We may not always realize that this is a privilege. The mineral kingdom gives us our foundation, the ground we walk upon, and the bones with which we walk. We find strength and security in this. We stand firm in our individuality, firm in our convictions. We find the grounds for our points of view. We build foundations, walls, bridges, and towers.

But this hardening of the earth and also of the human heart is the reason for Christ’s appearance on the earthly stage. We human beings went too far. We were hardening faster than we were able to manage. The Risen One reprimanded the Disciples for one thing: Their “hardness of heart.” Where are we today? Have we gotten any better?

We hear in Luke 21 that the heavens and the earth will be shaken. That which we have stood upon for so long shall be no more! It will happen when we least expect it. We are meant to be shaken! We are meant to awaken! The call of Advent is one of holy unrest. 

We have not been given so many gifts in order that we could sit back and bask in our own good fortune; to delight in our own cleverness. 

We who are not yet. We who are not yet spirit-filled, in whom the Spirit does not yet fully dwell, have hardened to the point where we do not remember the true meaning of earth existence! We are here to learn to love!

Once we begin to awaken, stone turns inside out and gives us another mission. Think of the birds, and how they eat small bits of stone and transform them into a shell to protect what is growing there, or how teachers and parents provide a firm structure and foundation so that the child can emerge and thrive. See how water crystalizes to become snow in order to provide a protective mantle for the plants below. 

What is it now that we need to protect? What is it that wants to be born?  We need to protect our faith. We need to protect our integrity, our ideals, our sense of what is right so that we do not become cynical or despairing. We need to protect our children. We need to protect those who are more vulnerable, marginalized, forgotten, persecuted. We need to protect the earth and her creatures. We need to protect the holy name of God and the living Christ who walks among us.

There is a reversal!

We who are always asking for things, for blessing and grace and all manner of favors, can become the ones who bestow them! Or else what does it mean to “walk with Christ?” or to have “Christ in you?”

We are the bearers of all that happens spiritually on the earth. This is our assignment: To read the signs of nature and to respond to them, to bear witness to the spiritual world weaving and working through the world, and to be the carriers of God’s becoming.

This requires a quiet, unhurried mood during Advent.

The Suffering of the Light

“ And one of the elders answered and said to me, ‘These who are clothed in white garments, who are they and from where do they come?’ and I said, ‘My Lord, you know.’ 

And he said to me, ‘ These are they who come out of the great suffering. They have washed their garments and made them white with the blood of the Lamb. Therefore they can stand before the throne of God and serve Him day and night in his temple.”  Rev. 7:13-16

Goethe has said that “Color is the deeds and suffering of light.” Light then, having become more material than it would have wished to have been, breaks into color.

We are each one of us, familiar with suffering to a greater or lesser degree. We would acknowledge that as much as we do not like it and would never invite it, that it brings many gifts in its wake. Sometimes these gifts do not show themselves until years after the suffering has ended.

Our suffering helps us to be compassionate with others, brings insight, gives us pause, helps us to learn to ask the right questions. Learning to ask the right questions might be the key to the solution to many of our problems today. It may be the way out of our difficulties, the right way of salvation. 

Parzival is the archetype of the evolving human being who only learns through great trials and suffering to ask the “right” question. He was immature, self-absorbed, and ignorant when he first came to The Grail castle. He failed to ask about the many wonders and also the suffering which was right in front of him. How often do we do this? 

Why is it that for some people, suffering brings about kindness, generosity, gratitude and invites them to become better human beings? Yet others become bitter, resentful, cynical, eternally wounded, or worse, destructive? What is the determining factor?

There is suffering by natural causes, for which no one is to blame, save perhaps our own karma. Then there is suffering inflicted upon us by others. This adds another very painful layer to the suffering. It is greatly disturbing to the soul to realize that human beings can be terribly cruel to one another. Then there are the sufferings of the world, of which we are more aware than ever today. We have to bear this. And with it, we bear the pain of not knowing what to do about it, how to help, or even how we can make any difference at all. We suffer because we are imprisoned in this paradigm.

Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other great leaders of the people have realized that if you give people immense purpose and meaning they are able to overcome their own personal needs for the good of the whole. People will summon courage and motivation they never knew they had and willingly sacrifice their own needs, their safety, even their lives for a greater cause. They willingly suffer. Is this a turning point?

When we have a higher purpose we are able to take suffering in a different, even useful way. It is still mightily painful but worth it if we can hope that through our suffering something good will come about. 

Peace activist Paul Chappell says in a recent interview in “Sun” magazine: “We have poverty in this country. But we also have poverty of purpose, malnutrition of meaning, and many unhealthy ways of feeding our non-physical needs. We can consider all of this a kind of Spiritual Poverty. The people suffering from spiritual poverty are much more dangerous than people suffering from material poverty.”

Can we articulate and strengthen our sense of purpose so much so that others can “catch” our enthusiasm and join us? Can we carry the suffering of the world in a transformative way, rather than letting it take us into depression?

We have all become more material than we would have wished to have been. Let us arise in color; in all races and tribes and nations and languages.

Let it arise through Christ in us.

Rev. Carol Kelly

Wisdom of the Elders

Nov 19–21, 2021

Friday Evening: 7pm–8pm

7:00 pm – “What Fairy Tales Tell Us About Growing Old. Pt. I” – Rev. Jim Hindes

Saturday: 9am-8pm

9:00am – The Act of Consecration of Man
10:00am – Light breakfast and coffee
10:30am – “What Fairy Tales Tell us about Growing Old. Pt. II”
11:15am – BREAK
11:30am – Let Us Hear From Our Elders:
“Living with The Act of Consecration for 40 yrs”. – Ted Pugh
“The Michael Chekov acting work as a spiritual activity”- Fern Sloan
1:00 – Lunch and Break
3:30 – Singing together
4:00 – Biographical Sharing: Gems of Wisdom Barbara Patterson and others
4:45 – BREAK
5:00 – “The Christ Impulse in the Age of the Consciousness Soul”– Douglas Sloan
6:00 – Supper
7:00 – “The Wisdom of the Elders” •( There is no replacement for experience)–Rev. Carol Kelly
8:00 – Close of Day

Sunday: 12:15pm

12:15 – “What does the Bible say about the course of human life?” – Rev. Jim HIndes

Please register with Rev. Kelly: carolkelly.cc@gmail.com 

Suggested Donation: $25-$75

New Altar Painting

Altar Painting by Ingrid Cowan Hass. Ingrid Cowan Hass grew up deep in the foothills of North Carolina surrounded by nature. She majored in Studio Art with a minor in Music from Smith College in Northampton, MA, and holds a Master’s degree in Opera Performance from the School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, NC. Since her move to Greenbelt, MD in 1998, Ingrid has sung professionally in opera, oratorio, and recital in the greater Washington DC area as a mezzo-soprano. In 2012, she founded a puppet company, Beech Tree Puppets, with her husband, Ole Hass, giving performances of their original works in schools, libraries, and public spaces. Ingrid teaches voice, piano, and various art classes to adults and children and maintains an art studio in her home. She is a member of The Christian Community in College Park, MD, an avid gardener, and a guiding force in the Biodynamic work at the church.

www.ingridcowanhass.com