We Long to Taste the Cup of our Eucharistic Life in Christ . . .
Vestry Senior Wardens Debbie Jonas & Brian Gray
As parishioners, leadership, and staff of Christ Church, we’ve all lived faithfully within another year of disrupted communal life in 2021. We long to taste the cup of our Eucharistic life in Christ. We want to regularly see one another’s faces, both in-person and without masks. Many of us feel the low-level malaise that this isn’t what we’ve previously known and loved about “living faith and life together.”
We are reminded of the honest, wise words of active indifference from Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer from 1926:
"God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other."
In that spirit, the Vestry recognizes the gift of faithful leadership from Christ Church’s clergy and staff during a complicated season. As parishioners, we can pause to empathize with the patience and adaptation required of our staff in their ongoing service: Connecting pastorally with the homebound or quarantined. Extra cleaning protocols for the sanctuary and Treasureland. Discussing Thomas a Kempis via Zoom. Drive-thru communion. Our liturgy was spoken by, and shared with, a dispersed Parish. Screen-based children’s lessons…Lord, have mercy!
We thank God and this Parish for the generous and sacrificial financial giving that has marked our communal life in 2021. Discipleship with our money is first and foremost about the economics of our hearts. And collectively, we have made commitments to honor and even exceed our pledged giving, and to support projects that are expanding our musical worship and online capacities. This generosity captures the way God’s grace and our financial stewardship are mysteriously wed.
The Vestry kept at the important but often meandering work of discerning a sense of vision for Christ Church moving forward. At our live September Weekend Away, we shared first conversations about this unfolding vision: “to be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and live like Jesus lived.” In 2022 we are planning an extended teaching series and experiential practices to help our Parish more deeply embody this vision of whole-life discipleship.
Finally, we have prayerfully journeyed alongside JoEllen and Terry McGugan in her battle with cancer, depending upon God’s mercy within the miracles of modern medicine. So many others in our Parish, our families, and our community have suffered significantly in this past season. We stay committed to the desperate cry of our Evening Prayers on behalf of the sick and suffering amongst us: Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.
A contemporary translation of St. Ignatius’ First Principle and Foundation from his Spiritual Exercises reads:
“All the things in this world are gifts of God, presented to us so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily.”
All of the experiences of 2021 - disruption, joy, endurance, suffering, celebration, and the like— are somehow gifts, in time. In our shared lives, we ask God’s grace to help us in accepting our past, our present, and our year ahead as the means to make a return of love more readily.
In gratitude for God and this Parish,
Debbie Jonas & Brian Gray
Vestry Wardens of Christ Church Denver