Letter from Our Minister
Letter from Rev. J. Carr Holland III
2024
Dear friends of the Chapel,
Our daily approach to life is influenced and framed by many things. We take in local and world news by print or viewing. We connect to family life by conversation, social media, and by time focused on family, such as a vacation together.
Our faith also informs our life through scripture, prayer, other reading, and community reflection. Hymns and anthems also help us to think theologically. One of my favorite Easter hymns, Now the Green Blade Riseth, connects Jesus’ resurrection to our emotional healing, where we rise to new or renewed life. The fourth verse is:
When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,
Jesus' touch can call us back to life again,
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green. (1)
What is caught here is our need to awaken to the deepest rhythms of life as designed by God. Here, also, is the idea that we come through times and spaces where we need to reawaken to the currents of life as God intended, where we are both loved and loving. The core image of Christianity is the resurrection of Christ, promising more than life eternal at the end of our earthly journey but life eternal every day of our journey. The spiritual energy of the Christian life is other-centered love. We gather to be called and recalled to God’s touch, which we know best in Jesus Christ, through the deep and often quiet spaces in our life. When we cease from busyness, we can open inwardly, listen, be better made, and find that place where we “springeth green” anew.
We gather again this season to offer a haven for our renewal and growth, not as an occasional thing but rather as the very rhythm of our lives. Largely that comes through patterned worship, the stilling of ourselves, in the Chapel, in the garden or on the beach perhaps. Life is also renewed, deepened in the greeting and being present to those for whom we care and in offering care to others in their need. In this publication you will find opportunities to be fed, to nurture our young, to gather for enlightenment, to care for one another in the changes of life, to serve the broader community, to awaken continually and purposefully to your inner/outer life as God intended.
We hope that each individual or family who visits this Chapel and its grounds, whether for the first time or the hundredth time, will find a place to be opened, welcomed, or enlivened as you need. In all the busyness of this Island, may you find here a place to pause, to be, to become renewed, to “springeth green.”
In Christ’s love,
The Reveren J. Carr Holland III
(1) Now The Green Blade Riseth. By John MacLeod Campbell Crum. #247
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