The Holy Trinity
Sunday June 11, 2017
What is God? St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that theology is our talk about God in response to God’s talk about God. God’s own talk is the very life of the Godhead. That conversation within the Godhead is, as Christians call it, the “Trinity”: an uttering in love, a Word uttered and Love returned, a sort of tryst. God himself is, as it were all talk, all love, all loving talk. And the Trinitarian life of God took the form of a Word made flesh and became speech addressed to us, the Word that is Christ is what St. Thomas calls, “holy teaching.” Theology as St. Thomas says, is neither more nor less than our human reception of and response to that Word of God that is spoken to us in Christ. Being in this way our talk about God’s talk about God, the discipline of theology begins and ends in the God it is about, the Trinitarian conversation extended into the human through Jesus’ prayer to his father, so that reciprocally, our human conversation might by grace and prayer extend into the Trinitarian life of God. Thus does the Christian, through faith, participate in the conversation that is God.
Aquinas: A Portrait
Denys Turner
Theology does not attempt to demonstrate the Trinitarian faith, but to disclose it to our minds more clearly within a contemplative exercise which is addressed to believers. This exercise obeys the basic laws of the human mind, which the understanding of the faith cannot avoid: we illumine that which is less known, or more obscure, by that which is more accessible, that is through realities which are better proportioned to what our own thinking is suited to know. Unless one does this, one can affirm the Trinitarian faith, but one cannot make it more evident to the mind of believes, which is the very task of theology.
The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas
Giles Emery O.P.
We are compelled to attempt what is unattainable, to climb where we cannot reach, to speak what we cannot utter. Instead of the bare adoration of faith we are compelled to entrust the deep things of religion to the perils of human expression.
St. Hilary of Poitiers
Music with the Angels
Jouyssance Concert: Sunday June 11, 4:00 p.m.
Jephte and Beyond
Giacomo Carissimi’s profoundly beautiful oratorio, Jephte, a monument of the early Baroque era, forms the cornerstone of this wide-ranging concert of sacred music exploring stories and texts from the Old Testament. Choral and instrumental compositions by Salamone Rossi, synagogue music by Louis Saladin and Carlo Grossi, and the well-known psalm setting Beatus vir by Monterverdi will round out the program. Indeed this is Jewish music as you’ve never heard it before!
For this one-of-a-kind of event, Jouyssance will be joined by the celebrated soprano Andrea Zomorodian, plus members of Southern California’s exciting mew music orchestra, Los Angeles Baroque.
Emmaus Road Monday, June 12, 7:00 p.m.
Emmaus Road has begun a new book, Simple Gifts: Living Lessons From a Shaker Villiage, by June Sprigg. The book is available from Amazon
Here’s a description :
In Simple Gifts, June Sprigg tells the story of one of America's last Shaker communities--Canterbury Shaker Village, in Canterbury, New Hampshire--during its twilight years, and of its seven remarkable "survivor" women, who were among the last representatives of our longest-lived and best-known communal utopian society. As a college student Sprigg spent a summer among them, and here she gracefully interweaves the narrative of their lives with the broader history of Shakers in America as she shows us how her experiences there affected her own life and opened the door to her creativity.
Gleaning information from old records and journals that she pored over that summer and later, Sprigg brings to life the generations of Canterbury Shakers from the eighteenth century to the present--their customs, their architecture, their spirituality. She also explores the social and cultural forces and the internal imperatives and tensions that caused membership to decrease, all of which, by 1972, brought the community to crisis.
Chronicling the daily life of the village as she found it, Sprigg uncovers the affirming energies of the Shakers--the prominence of mutual love and respect, the devoted tradition of mothering surrogate children, and, above all, the surviving women's spirited eccentricities. She reveals the Shakers as individuals--their personal histories, their wildly different beginnings, what they gave up to join the Shaker community, and, more important, what they gained.
Through her lively text and drawings and her intimate connection with the community, Sprigg brings us close to its people with a book that both enlightens and inspires.
Religious Potential of the Child: Thursday, June 15, 7:00 p.m.
Fr. Bob will lead a group in reading The Religious Potential of the Child, by Sofia Cavalletti. This is the foundational text for our spiritual formation program for our children called The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. This reading group is for people seeking to understand more deeply how the life of faith develops in children and how adults can facilitate, that is cooperate with God in what he is doing in the depths of their children. The group will meet in Fr. Bob’s office. This coming Thursday we’ll have an overview of the book and some demonstrations of the insights contained in it. Fr. Bob has books available. Get a hold of him if you need one.
Outreach Committee
The Outreach Committee met Sunday, May 21 and continued our discussion on how to move forward to address needs beyond the walls and grounds of Church of the Angels. We are in the process of incorporating new ideas for activities and continuing to check in and support ongoing ministries. So, while we are still working to support the De La Torre family and helping build up the school library in Uganda, as well as selling crafts for Global Hands of Help, we can also have activities that anyone and everyone in the parish can participate in "at home".
We are now gearing up to create Blessing Bags that parishioners can take and give to those in need that we encounter on our daily journeys in the community. The idea behind Blessing Bags is to provide necessary items to people who are homeless. To start, we need to collect personal hygiene items, non-perishable food items, etc. We will have a container to collect donated items at church on Sundays.
The items we are looking to gather now are:
Toiletries - baby wipes/body wipes, dry shampoo, travel toothbrushes, travel toothpaste, dental floss, lotion, sunscreen, chapstick, tissue packs, women's sanitary products, combs, deodorant, band-aids (please no mouthwash or hand sanitizer)
Foods - (think easy to open packaging, easily consumed by those with limited dental care) small ready-to-eat cans with easy open lids, applesauce, pudding, crackers, soft cereal bars, beef jerky, trail mix, bottled water, dried fruit, nuts
Other - new socks, new sunhats or ball caps, ponchos, emergency blankets
During the summer we will have a gathering to put together bags to be dispersed.
Another outreach organization that to note is The Interfaith Refugee and Immigration Services, which is a non-profit, non-sectarian organization that offers refugee resettlement assistance, employment placement and immigration legal aid.
They are a program of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, and the Southern California-based affiliate of Episcopal Migration Ministries, Church World Service, and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. Despite their affiliations, they embrace people of all faiths, races and ethnicities.
Recent immigration policies and developments have greatly affected their work. Their greatest need at the moment is for donations to keep operations going, but they are occasionally in need of furniture or help with a last minute move. For more information please feel free to contact Anne Miles (Anne.e.miles@gmail.com)
Food For Thought
1. From The New York Review of Books, “China’s Astounding Religious Revival.” This article describes the explosion of religious life in mainland China after years of repression under the Mao and the Communists. We see the amazing diversity of both traditional Chinese practice: folk religion, Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism along with new things like Falun Gong, but also Islam and Christianity.
2. From Ways of Imperfection by Simon Tugwell a short reading from Celebrating the Seasons: Daily Spiritual Readings for the Christian Year. Finishing the first half of the Church year with the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost and the Great Commission on Trinity Sunday, we reflect on how the lived reality of Christianity is sometimes disappointing due to the difference between our proclamation and hope and inevitable human imperfection.
The two readings taken together open us to the mystery of what God is actually doing with us between now and when the History of the Kingdom of God is complete.