ABOUT US
CONGREGATION LIFE
The Congregation Mission Statement
We are a family of Christians, drawn together by a common mission:
"To build and nurture an active Christian community; to support the mission of the Cathedral; to offer opportunities for exploring and expressing spirituality, affirming the diversities that exist among us; above all, through worship, service, and example, to bear witness to Christ's healing and reconciling love to neighbors, pilgrims, and visitors."
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February Letter 2008
Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ,
With our Annual Meeting and the season of Epiphany behind us, we turn our faces towards the wilderness as we contemplate Ash Wednesday and the gift of this Lenten time of reflection and penitence.
This is the moment to reassess our relationship with the Divine, to try to figure out what is blocking our awareness of the Holy in our daily lives. What is in the way of feeling our Creator’s tremendous love for us? In what area of our lives do we need Christ’s healing hands?
Martin Smith, a gifted priest and former superior of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, notes the ways in which confession may be a useful tool to this process of healing in Reconciliation: Preparing for Confession in the Episcopal Church (Cowley Publications, 1985). According to Smith, if we claim to be a part of the body of Christ, then it is important to understand that our individual sin has a communal impact. He defines sin as, “a thoroughly social reality involving the other members of that body.” He writes, “My sinning saps the vitality of the church, breaks my covenant with my fellow baptized, compromises and weakens the integrity of the community, and can scandalize outsiders.” (p. 14) He goes on to say that “Repentance is not a strategy for self-improvement, but the surfacing of desire for those gifts—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control—which render sinful ways redundant and rob them of their appeal.” (p. 59) This book invites the reader to look at emotional responses that may be in the way of self-examination, and provides a gentle and helpful chapter on how to prepare for a first confession.
One of Desmond Tutu’s great gifts to the world has been his insistence on the importance of truth telling and healing. His superb book No Future Without Forgiveness (Doubleday, 1999) describes the hard work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, and why revisiting the scenes of the most horrible atrocities was the only way to open the door to new life in that country. He writes, “Forgiving means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin, but it is a loss that liberates the victim.” (p. 272)
Our struggle is not just with our own failings and the difficulty of forgiving others who have sinned against us, but also living in a society that is cruel and unjust.
On Sunday, January 20, 2008, at the Service of Liberation marking the bicentennial of the American abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, Bishop Catherine Roskam offered an apology to Africa that was moving to those who heard her speak:
Of all the places we have exploited—and we have exploited many—it is only from you that we have also stolen the people.
I am sorry that we took your people and held them in bondage for centuries, a holocaust of perhaps twenty million souls.
Africa, we transported your children in conditions unfit for any living creature. When they became sick or died, we threw them overboard, like so much unwanted ballast. Those that completed the excruciating journey, we sold like cattle, auctioning them off to the highest bidder.
This past summer after going to Tanzania on pilgrimage with Carpenter’s Kids, my husband and I spent two days in Zanzibar. We visited the Anglican Cathedral there, built over the site of the old slave market. We saw the tiny airless chambers below, the only one preserved to show how inhumanely the slaves were kept while waiting to be sold. We saw also the inlaid marble circle in front of the altar marking the place of the whipping post where slaves were tied one after another and whipped to see if they would cry. If they did, they brought a lower price.
What allows such brutality to rest in the hearts of those purporting to be Christian? Where was compassion?
I am sorry, Africa. I benefit still from that brutality. The whole U.S. economy is based on stolen goods. It was built on the backs of slave labor, on the trafficking of human beings and on the precious gems and metals ripped out of the bowels of Africa over the years. The first stocks sold on the stock market were African people.
I am sorry.”
It is never too late to ask forgiveness. May we have the courage to repent and turn again to the Lord.
The Rev. Canon Victoria Sirota
Canon Pastor and Vicar
"I am sorry, Africa.
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