Summer seems to allow us at times to interrupt our routines and to sit back and reflect. You may think that this is stereotypical, and that our summers have long become part of the yearlong rat race. Nevertheless, I have recently enjoyed several conversations and not just one, where people expressed surprise by the fact that their calling here at church has developed in such unexpected ways.
I want to give you an illustration, but I will use myself as an example so as to not break trust. However, the underlying principle is the same for many of us. In fact, I suspect that it shapes much of our life experience far beyond the walls of the church.
As you probably know, I like music, the history of ideas, adult education, preaching, and visiting with people. I used to not like numbers, brick and mortar, and social networking. Ah! Social networking was the worst! I would always prefer a library or archive room over against a ballroom. Yet… and you know the rest of the story.
As I indicated, several of us share similar experiences. We like certain things, but life employs us differently. And this is not limited to the realm of the church. Few of us are able to stay faithful to their college majors through the rest of life. Is this not so?
And so I am wondering what it means. As we grow older, we ask ourselves perhaps a bit more often to what degree our life has been successful. But what is success? Prior to understanding this as a spiritual question, we might simply identify success with reaching a pre-set goal. A goal could be to successfully build a career in a certain field of interest. The degree by which we deviate from this goal would then be a measure for failure and success.
This is pre-spiritual, I said. For I am not sure Christians can ultimately think that way. There is always this one word of our Lord in the way, and no earthly power can remove it: “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.” (Mark 14:36) It summarizes our religious experience that God may have different plans, that his thoughts are not our thoughts.
Recently, my father-in-law sent me a collection of religious sayings. One of these turned out to be a modern footnote to the quote from the Gospel of Mark: “God doesn’t call the qualified. He qualifies the called.” At first, this may just be a surprising swap of terms. But wait a moment, perhaps there is more! Have you ever thought that ending up in a life-place other than the intended may contribute to your inner growth?
By contrast, if we only follow the things we planned our inner growth may never reach its full bloom. However, I want to be careful here. When Jesus said, “not what I want, but what you want,” he was not talking about a plan for his future life, but his death on the cross. Our comparison must stop at this point, where we remain behind, allowed to plan our lives, when he was not.
I greet you with these thoughts and wish you all a blessed a meaningful summer.
Warwick Retreat has been cancelled due to lack of interest.
( Friday, July 30th through Sunday, August 1st.)
On September 11th, Lorraine Nelson-Wolff, a Reformed Church musician, concert artist, and songwriter, will be giving a concert in First Reformed Church at 7:00 p.m. The following day, September 12th, Rally Sunday, she and her family will join us for worship in the sanctuary, at which time she will present us with a “song gift.”
The gift is a piece of music that she is writing especially for First Reformed Church which emphasizes the musical skills of our congregation, and exemplifies the mission and atmosphere of our church. These are two events that the members of our congregation will not want to miss.
Mrs. Nelson-Wolff is a very talented musician and has been gracious enough to have sent music to us many times before. We have sung her music during the introits in Advent and Lent. It is richly melodic and written in the antiphonal style, which means that one group sings and another group responds. Finally, we will get to meet this gifted woman on September 11th in the fellowship hall of our church.
Tagged as:
Gift Song,
Rally Sunday
For children between the ages of 3 and 13! August 23rd – 27th, 9:00 a.m. – noon, this is a combined event with the four collegiate Reformed Churches and will be hosted by the Highland Park Reformed Church.
Tagged as:
VBS
In the sixth century of the Common Era, a blind monk named Dallán Forgaill wrote the poem Rop tú mo baile. This poem is a submission to the complex and infinitely incomprehensible will of God. It is also a plea to Him to guide a person with limited means to use his or her gifts to the utmost ability. This Irish monk recognizes that God grants us many daily and life-long blessings, while challenging us with severe limitations at the same time. Since the monk did not see in the physical sense (in fact, his name, “Dallán,” means “little blind one”), he probably submitted to God’s guidance even more than if he were sighted.
Rop tú mo baile was translated to English in 1905 by Mary Byrne, and versified in 1918 by Eleanor Hull. Then it was set to the Irish folk song, Slane, and we know it best today as the hymn, “Be Thou my Vision.” The text of the first stanza is:
Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart,
naught be all else to me, save that thou art;
Thou my best thought by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.
Since blindness is the incapacity to perceive light, the last line magnifies the monk’s handicap. However, it incorporates the sense that God is our other senses, as well, namely, our thinking, or sense of reasoning. Most importantly, when one sings this hymn the idea is that God simply exists and that is enough, as in the second line.
The adult choir sang a very moving arrangement of this hymn in June by Philip Stopford. Ellen Hamilton provided the flute obbligato and Norma Vande Bunte sang the soprano solo. This is one of the anthems that the adult choir considers one of its “own.” We have grown to love the text, the music, and the composer. We sang it in September, but I thought that it was beautiful enough to bring it out again. Needless to say, we learned many new things about it the second time around. Needless to say, if we sing it a third time in the future, we will learn even more about its tremendously powerful and far-reaching text.
At First Reformed Church we know that God is not going to do something for us when we think we need Him to act. We must be confident that God is present in every action and every sense that we express every day. His mere presence is enough to provide the energy and senses that allow us to live every day. We can often live without seemingly essential equipment, even our sight (or smell, hearing, taste, feeling, memory, etc.). This is because we know that God is all of this equipment to us, and He exists eternally, including the present moment, and everywhere. Praise Him, and rejoice in the blessing of God’s existence.
Let Him guide all of your actions and know that His will is being executed in each moment.
The pastors will be on vacation July 19th through the 25th & August 9th through the 22nd.
The following is part of a report submitted on behalf of our church to the NJ Historic Trust. We print it here so that our readers may receive first-hand information on the developments in our old cemetery. We have much reason to be grateful for the wonderful work that Christine and her students undertake.
Christine Miller Cruiess, a part-time lecturer at Rutgers, will be leading a field school in the Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies Program (CHAPS). The goal of the field school is two-fold. First, the students will conduct a conditions assessment that will inform a Preservation Plan for the cemetery, following the New Jersey Historic Preservation Office’s Historic Structure Reports and Preservation Plans. The preservation plan for the site will be heavily informed by students’ work during the Spring 2010 term, the pre-requisite course for the field school. During the Spring 2010 term, the students completed archival research on the cemetery and those interred there, research into the materials in the cemetery, research into different conservation methods and techniques that conform to the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards, and a survey form and glossary to document the current conditions of each individual grave marker in the cemetery. The preservation plan will build upon the students’ previous work and create a prioritized treatment plan for the treatment of the entire cemetery site.
The second goal of the course will be comprised on a pilot implementation program where students will gain hands-on experience completing conservation treatments. The students will be supervised by two conservators who have extensive experience in outdoor monument and cemetery conservation (resumes available upon request). In summary, the proposed conservation treatments will include:
- Cleaning grave markers with D/2 (available from Cathedral Stone), an architectural antimicrobial.
- Repairing breaks in sandstone and marble markers using a structural epoxy.
- Repointing cracks and joints in grave markers using a lime-based mortar for marble markers and using a Jahn Patching mortar (available from Cathedral Stone) for repairing sandstone markers.
- Injection grouting delaminations in sandstone using a grout with water, lime, silica micro-balloons, and a fine silica sand.
- Resetting markers with proper alignment.
All treatments will conform with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards.
Tagged as:
Cemetery,
cultural heritage,
grave markers,
Preservation
