St. Matthias Anglican Church | Anglican church in Victoria, BC

As I sit down to write this Vestry report and think of the challenge and joy this past year has brought to us, I am reminded of the Mary Oliver poem called Wild Geese, which we shared at coffee hour one week:

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

There has been deep loneliness and uncertainty this year. We have been disrupted from regular patterns and have missed being together on so many of the important feasts and occasions of our church year. We have lamented the diminished connections to each other that offer us hugs and shared meals and voices lifted up in song. We have been parted from family members and have mourned the passing of loved ones without the shared rituals of grief and remembrance.

Meanwhile, the poet reminds us: the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination...

While we have been scattered we have also been offered a chance to draw closer to God and to each other. While we have been isolated we have also been invited to expand our imagination and to find our place in the wider weave of creation - to look up at the stars and see ourselves as just one small part of this amazing tapestry.

While we have been living with deep uncertainty we have also been held by the steady presence of God walking with us. I was aware of some of this steady stream of presence as I looked back on how we began the year. Early 2020 started with a Chapel Gallery show on pilgrimage, we walked the advent spiral and we will end this vestry period with another show on pilgrimage. We began our year with a call to watershed discipleship where five neighbouring parishes and ministries joined together to reflect on our own watershed and from God’s Spirit in these lands and this Lent we will return to a focus on Spirit and place through our book study. Pilgrimage and place have been touchstones on this rocky ride of a year and this seems very fitting for what I have witnessed. We have been pilgrims in a strange and often dry wilderness. The usual markers of our lives and future have become unfamiliar and yet, in some ways, we have been recalled to who we are, where we are, and whose we are.

A few weeks after our buildings closed I wrote in our newsletter:

I have been thinking that we have read and talked and heard sermons about the wilderness for so long and finally we get a taste of that experience. Our usual touchstones of buildings and people and worship have been disrupted. We wander through unfamiliar territory. Our longing for the Promised Land grows as we anticipate the time when we will return to the home and family that is the body of Christ re-membered, reunited once more around the table of thanksgiving. Yet in this time God is with us and never leaves us to face our perils alone. God is forming us as a people reliant on God’s provision and Word –a people made in God’s own image and filled with God's presence and hope.

I have seen this presence and hope in you even in very difficult times, and I have been inspired and so very thankful for the spiritual growth that I have witnessed in you this past year.

I am profoundly grateful for your care and support in my own times of exhaustion and struggle and for the ways you have shown me grace, patience and the love of God in this time. I am so thankful for each of you and your incredible faithfulness during this time.

We are not home yet, we continue to walk together through uncharted territory but I know this pilgrimage to deepen our knowledge of God and each other is shaping us for the important work we will do in the years ahead.

I am so very honoured to have served with you this past year and look forward with hope and anticipation to our next year together!

Yours in the risen Christ

The Reverend Meagan Crosby-Shearer

In response to the BC provincial health officer’s extension of the COVID-19 health order, the diocese of British Columbia is suspending all in-person worship, meetings, events and community gatherings until at least April 12. Please know that having a socially distanced visit with your clergy is ok. Feel free to be in touch with how we can best support you during this time!

The letter is below and attached in the news post.

"Today, February 5, 2021, the provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, extended the January 7 health order
suspending in-person public worship, social and community events and gatherings—whether indoors or outdoors— indefinitely, as part of widespread measures being implemented across the province. In response to this updated order, the diocese is extending the suspension of all in-person worship,
gatherings, events and meetings (indoors and outdoors) until at least April 12.

Ash Wednesday is not an exception to these restrictions. While the imposition of ashes is not available to us at this time, all of the spiritual practices of Lent—self-examination, penitence, prayer, almsgiving, fasting and meditating on Scripture —are available and should be encouraged.
All other restrictions on the use of our spaces will remain unchanged until further notice.

I know that it is deeply disappointing to once again be contemplating Easter apart from one another. We so long to be together in the Eucharistic feast. Instead, we are unwillingly united by our Eucharistic fast. It is an uncomfortable place to be. However, I feel that God is calling us to learn something about the importance of Eucharist and sacrament apophatically. I believe God is calling us, as the church, to spend this season being sacrament to one another by living out our baptismal promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbours as ourselves.

I am asking you to find creative and life-giving ways to walk through Lent and into the joyful resurrection of Christ Jesus, together. Consider collaborating with the other parishes in your region. Perhaps take turns hosting online Holy Week services or join together for a Lenten study series. And, in all of this, use what you have learned this past year to be a renewed people, with renewed hearts and renewed spirits so that you can be light to the world.

As has been the case since the beginning of the pandemic, diocesan leaders will continue to consult with provincial health authorities, and I will now join them. We will continue to relay to the province the challenges we face as people of faith—as sacramental people formed in communities gathered at the table.

At the same time, we will continue to show our steadfast support of every effort made to keep the most vulnerable—the least of these—among us, safe. We will continue to show the sacrificial love we are called to in Christ.

Thank you for your ongoing leadership throughout this time. I am grateful to be with you, in spirit, if not in body. Please reach out if there is anything we at the synod office can do to support you.

Blessings,
Anna

The Right Rev. Anna Greenwood-Lee
Bishop

Join the Emmaus Community, A Rocha Canada, and Wild Church for this Lenten book study.

Register at the Eventbrite page link button below.

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/book-study-blue-sapphire-of-the-mind-notes-for-a-contemplative-ecology-tickets-138511777455?aff=

Beginning February 18, 7-8:30 PM (preface and Chapter 1 for the first week available by email)

Led by Rev. Matthew Humphrey, Curator of Wild Church Victoria.

"There are no unsacred places," the poet Wendell Berry has written. "There are only sacred places and desecrated places."

What might it mean to behold the world with such depth and feeling that it is no longer possible to imagine it as something separate from ourselves, or to live without regard for its well-being?

To understand the work of seeing things as an utterly involving moral and spiritual act? Such questions have long occupied the centre of contemplative spiritual traditions.

In The Blue Sapphire of the Mind, Douglas E. Christie proposes a distinctively contemplative approach to ecological thought and practice that can help restore our sense of the earth as a sacred place. Drawing on the insights of the early Christian monastics as well as the ecological writings of Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, and many others, Christie argues that, at the most basic level, it is the quality of our attention to the natural world that must change if we are to learn how to live in a sustainable relationship with other living organisms and with one another.

He notes that in this uniquely challenging historical moment, there is a deep and pervasive hunger for a less fragmented and more integrated way of apprehending and inhabiting the living world--and for a way of responding to the ecological crisis that expresses our deepest moral and spiritual values.

Christie explores how the wisdom of ancient and modern contemplative traditions can inspire both an honest reckoning with the destructive patterns of thought and behaviour that have contributed so much to our current crisis and a greater sense of care and responsibility for all living beings. These traditions can help us cultivate the simple, spacious awareness of the enduring beauty and wholeness of the natural world that will be necessary if we are to live with greater purpose and meaning, and with less harm, to our planet.

Douglas Christie is a Catholic theologian and professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE BOOK NOW and join us on February 18!

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The Annual Vestry Meeting for St. Matthias Anglican Church will be held on Sunday, February 21, 2021, at 1 pm via Zoom

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