St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
  Chilkat Valley Episcopal Mission

Please enjoy the following writings that our priest has gathered together over the years. Usually printed on the back of our service bulletin, we now share them here.

O God, above all things...
What words can sing your praises?
No word at all denotes you.
What mind can probe your secret?
No mind at all can grasp you.
Alone beyond the power of speech,
All we can speak springs from you;
Alone beyond the power of thought,
All we can think stems from you.

All things proclaim you:
Things that can speak, things that cannot.
The whole world's longing
And pain mingle about you.
All things breathe you a prayer,
A silent hymn of your own composing.
---Gregory of Nazianzen

Peace will be but an empty sounding word unless it is founded on an order founded on truth, built according to justice, vivified and integrated by charity, and put into practice in freedom
---John XXIII, Pacem in terris, 1963
 

...
Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God.
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware
more and more from the first similitude.
---Elizabeth Barret Browning, "Aurora Leigh"

Poets, too, are crazed by light,
How to capture its changes,
How to be accurate in seizing
What has been caught by the eye
--- It is harder to see what one sees
Than anyone knows.
Monet knew, spent a lifetime
Trying to undazzle the light
And pin it down.
---May Sarton, Letters from Maine: New Poems

An old man was asked by a soldier, "Does God accept repentance?" The reply, "Tell me, my dear, if your cloak is torn, do you throw it away?" Answering him, the soldier said, "No, I mend it and use it again." The old man said to him, "If you spare your own vesture, would God not be kind to his own image?"
---Abba Macarius the Great of Egypt

Religion is the result of what man does with his ultimate wonder, with the moments of awe, with the sense of mystery Thinking about God begins when we do not know any more how to wonder, how to fear, how to be in awe. For wonder is not a state of esthetic enjoyment. Endless wonder is endless tension, a situation in which we are shocked at the inadequacy of our awe, at the weakness of our shock, as well as the state of being asked the ultimate question We are asked to wonder, to revere, to think and to live in a way compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living. What gives birth to religion is not intellectual curiosity but the fact and experience of our being asked.
---Abraham Henschel, God in Search of Man

Prayer in a Benedictine community is to be both regular and artistic and it is the role of leadership to see that this is so For all of us prayer must be regular, not haphazard, not erratic, not chance. At the same time it cannot be routine or meaningless or without substance. Prayer has to bring beauty, substance, and structure to our otherwise chaotic and superficial lives or it is not long before life itself becomes chaotic and superficial. A life of spiritual substance is a life of quality. The Tao put it this way:
She who is centered in the Tao
can go where she wishes, without danger. She perceives the universal harmony, even amid great pain,
because she has found peace in her heart.
-----Joan Chittister, O.S.B.