Category The Parish Paper

All Saints Day is past, but its themes linger in this final month of the church year. On the one side, there is what I would call its earthly aspect, all too familiar to us, of grief and loss, of mortal frailty, and our prayer for God’s mercy. That’s why, when we commemorate all souls…

Visiting the celebrated Uffizi galleries in Florence is an ordeal. They have been sucked into the dark hole of bucket-list-driven mass tourism, and the opportunity to contemplate their celebrated collections requires teeth-gritted determination. Yet even in the Uffizi there are nooks and crannies that are but lightly affected by the crowds, and one of them…

Music at Madison Square Sunday was the inaugural concert of Music at Madison Square, and the Organist-Choirmaster William Douglas and the supporters of The Aquila Music Foundation (many of them parishioners) are to be congratulated for an auspicious beginning to what promises to be a varied series of musical events of a high order. The autumnal-themed…

Sunday mornings: what we could be doing with them instead of going to church! There is, of course, the allure of the golf course (to which I am immune), or for sedentary folks like me there could be a leisurely breakfast of coffee, eggs, crisp bacon, bitter marmalade, buttered toast, and a large metropolitan newspaper with a hefty book reviews and arts sections (do such things still exist? I am a bit oldschool in my ideas of allurement).

Reprinted from September 2019. Many Christians in North America worship in buildings that are intentionally “unchurchy” in character – anonymous, generic spaces similar in style (or lack of style) to stores, offices, and movie theatres. The idea is to eliminate any possible impediment to the visitor, to make the transition from casual consumer culture to…

Revised and reprinted from 2020. There is a small colony of ants near the rectory bathroom windowsill. When I leave a drop of toothpaste foam near the sink, they form a little column of anxious diligence, scurrying back and forth to claim this doubtful treasure. Along with the cats in the house, they remind me…

 William Douglas, Organist & Choirmaster at St. John’s, contributed the essay this week.  Why do church musicians all around the world spend hours each week preparing for services of worship? Why do choir members give so much of their time to rehearse on their own, together, and even just before services? For example, the musicians…

What comes to mind when you are asked to fill out a pledge card? For many of us, it feels like another bill to pay—a religious bill, perhaps, but still one more obligation to fit in alongside all the others. Naturally, we compare it with other ways that money could be used. Naturally, we want…

Holy Cross Day, which falls this Sunday, September 14th, is a feast that originated in the discovery and recovery of what was believed to be the True Cross on which Christ was crucified. Said to have been discovered by the empress Helena (the mother of the first Christian emperor, Constantine) in 326 A.D., the portion…

The Christian life is about faith, hope, and love — faith in Christ, hope in his promises, and love for one another. These are not things we can stir up by sheer willpower; they are gifts of the Holy Spirit. And the Spirit strengthens them most of all when believers gather together — in prayer,…

We live in unsettling times. No doubt this is true of every age of history, but ours especially so. Back in the 1950’s, human beings began worrying about nuclear warfare. Since then, other existential threats have emerged: the warming of the earth’s atmosphere, the collapse of the birth rate, the impending avalanche of public debt,…