Pastoral Messages from Fr. Rick 11-19-20

Happy Feast of Christ the King and Happy Thanksgiving!

I am again especially happy and thankful to the folks here at St. Christopher’s for your generosity, hospitality and bountiful service to our community, to those who visit our parish and to me personally.  Having the opportunity to live a life of relative solitude and contemplation in this beautiful place has been one of the great blessings of my life.  Despite the great disruptions to our lives and routines in 2020, I can’t help but be especially hopeful.  The Feast of Christ the King, falling on the last Sunday of Ordinary Time, reminds us that God is still on the throne and that new beginnings start with leaving behind some of the old.  We are all being purified and ‘reset’ more than we realize during this time of trial and grief for so many.  It seems however, that with a vaccine soon in the making, next year at this time we should be well on our way back to a less restricted mode of living and gathering.  Let us be especially attentive to the new gifts God is offering to us.

________________________________________________________

Kindly Consider the Official Proclamation of Thanksgiving

Washington, D.C.

October 3, 1863

By the President of the United States of America.  A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President,

Abraham Lincoln                                                                                        

William H. Seward, Secretary of State