Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Our reading from Ecclesiasticus this morning (listing the sorts of things for which the righteous, both remembered and unremembered, are reknowned), coming as it does after All Saints and All Souls, has put me in mind of this quotation from Léon Bloy: “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” And, dear Friend, I hope you’ll forgive me if I reproduce here some thoughts in this direction from the most recent edition of The Shepherd’s Voice, our weekly Newsletter for Children, Youth, and Family Ministries. It’s a little longer than usually, so I’m grateful to you for your forbearance!

One of the things I’ve asked our families to practice is setting aside five minutes a day of prayer together as a family. And I’ve called this period of prayer The Five Golden Minutes. Those five minutes can grow to longer periods throughout the day, but a period of no less than five minutes is a good start. I’d encourage you, too, to engage in this practice, my Friend, particularly if you’ve yet to incorporate a period of prayer into your day! And this is why such a period of prayer is important, and not just relatively important, but vitally, crucially, needfully important...

Because prayer grows the soul. Our corporate worship as a Parochial Church (principally the Eucharist and the Daily Office) also forms and grows the soul and is vitally important...and it's also the case that the corporate worship of the Church is no replacement or proxy for the private prayer life of the individual Christian--you simply cannot substitute out one for the other, nor is it possible to insist that corporate worship and private prayer are interchangeable without seriously stunting the growth of your soul. One helpful metaphor might be the intricate warp and weft of a beautiful tapestry--without the interweaving of the threads, there's no tapestry, the image is unstable, illegible, it all frays into fringe.

It's very easy for us to compartmentalize our lives: this is work, this is home, this is friends, this is family, this is play, this is church. And our compartmentalization of our lives can just as easily lead us to believe that Jesus Christ is King only of that part of our life that pertains to things ecclesiastical. But that is simply not the case: Jesus Christ is Lord of all of our lives--every aspect, every dimension, every bit of them. And to claim in our worship that Jesus is King, but to live in our lives as if he's not, or as if his sovereignty is conditioned by whether or not it’s convenient for us to recognize it in any given moment...it doesn't work. It's not sustainable. It frets and frays the tapestry of our lives to ribbons. It leaves us closed to the transforming power of grace to which our worship and prayer is meant to open us.

And that's the point: transformation. The world simply cannot afford for Christians to be Christians for an hour or two a week. It can't. All of creation, says Saint Paul in Romans 8, is groaning for the revelation of the Children of God. It's not groaning for the revelation of the people who volunteer a little bit now and then or who like doing nice things to occupy their time. It's not groaning for the self-improved or the self-realized. It's not groaning for the occasionally charitable. It's not groaning for the revelation of the folks who pay lip service to love but can't be bothered to be transformed by it and into it. It's groaning for the revelation of the Children of God, for a people who are revealing in their own lives, in the wholeness of their lives, that a new creation is coming to be, that a new world is coming to be: for a people in whom the Kingdom of God is a living reality.

Beloved, the world is groaning for you. For us. For the whole Church, Parochial and Domestic. And the only way that we can meet the world's pain and brokenness (and our own pain and brokenness) in a way that is coherently Christian, in a way that looks like God, that looks like Love incarnated in a community, in a life...is if we understand the fundamental realities that our life and our prayer are one and the same thing; that Jesus is Lord of All of our lives, the source and goal of all of our prayer; and that God will use our prayer to transform our lives by grace into living patterns of God's own life of love, nearer likenesses of the glory revealed in Jesus Christ, a people in whom the image of God is vibrant, unobscured, and legible. And all of that transformation grows with a commitment to the life of prayer to which we are called in Christ, a commitment which comes from grace, is sustained by grace, and leads to grace in a process the Church calls sanctification. Grace saves us through faith, and grace sanctifies us by making it possible for us to live the life of faith, the life of prayer, and by using our prayer to grow us in faith and in the holiness of sanctification.

Five Golden Minutes a day are a sign of the desire for sanctification in a commitment to prayer, are a step toward the total consecration of one's life to God through Christ in the Holy Ghost...and it's a step toward the transformation not only of our lives, but of the entire broken world. Because the more our lives are transparent to God, the more we will be instruments of the Kingdom's coming, knowing and doing the good that God has prepared for us to do because we are that good active in the world: lights of the world in our generation.

That's why those Five Golden Minutes are so important. They grow faith. They grow hope. They grow love. They grow a new world in us and in the world around us. Because, by God's good grace, they grow saints.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+