Ancient Anglican

We ask God to keep watch with those who weep because we know the end. John gives us this vision of a transformed creation where the church is that beautiful, life-giving, at-one-ness with God. “Weeping may tarry for the night / but joy comes with the morning.” Ps. 30:5b.

It is in the quiet and in the solitude of the night that our unresolved sadness begins to spill out. We ask God to watch over those who persist in unresolved grief because we know that each of us will suffer from this persistent grief.

Years after completing our study on Ecclesiastes, I ran across a blog post by Richard Beck at Experimental Theology concerning how Ecclesiastes fits within the Hebrew canon. This post is reproduced here.

She ends this chapter with the promise that God does make: “he will keep us close, even in darkness, in doubt, in fear and in vulnerability. He promises that we will not be left alone. He will keep watch with us in the night.”

The question, therefore, that we must face is “How do we trust a God who does not stop [bad things] from happening? How do we dare ask him to keep watch?”

When we pray the prayers we’ve been given by the church – the prayers of the psalmist and the saints, the Lord’s Prayer, the Daily Office – we pray beyond what we can know, believe, or drum up ourselves.

As I prayed that night, I wanted to believe the things I proclaimed: that God knew and loved me, that this terrible moment, too, would be redeemed. I believed it and I didn’t. Reaching for this old prayer service was an act of hope.

In her book, Rev. Warren seeks to guide us into a very heart-centered experiential contemplation of our relationship with God, even when it seems that God may be absent.

A Preview of our studies for 2023. We hope you can join us at 6pm every Tuesday in 2023 beginning January 10.

The carol instructs us to listen – not to do, not to speak, not to plan – but to simply listen to the Good News of the birth of the Savior, and to simply listen to the angelic praises being sung.

Like Whitfield’s ignoring Wesley’s instructions concerning words, so Cummings ignored Mendelssohn’s directions concerning music. Therefore, for Christmas 1856, Cummings put Wesley’s words (as amended by Whitfield) to Mendelssohn’s tune, thus giving us the Christmas carol that we sing today.

Christmas is not simply a historical event that happened in a land far away a long time ago but is an event that actively and presently occurs in your life and throughout the Church here and now.