Beloved in Christ
This past Sunday, I announced our intention to start using the office of Morning Prayer as our principle Sunday morning worship service. This will begin on Sunday (August 16) and continue for the next four weeks until the end of the summer (September 6). During that time, we will also host a series of conversations to help deepen our understanding and appreciation, both for worship in the Anglican tradition generally, and Morning Prayer in particular. Through these discussions, we hope to hear from many of you about your hopes for worship at All Angels as we launch into a new program year on September 13.
As I said on Sunday, the question of whether to continue celebrating the Eucharist has been discussed at length since the beginning of the pandemic––both at our church and in the broader Episcopal Church. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, for example, reminded us early onthat the Eucharist normally depends on physical and social realities not duplicatable in a virtual world. So, he suggested that “online worship may be better suited to ways of praying represented by the forms of the Daily Office [like Morning Prayer] than by the physical and material dimensions required by the Eucharist.” The Bishop of the Diocese of New York also invited all the parishes in his Diocese (which includes us) to share in a “fast” from the Eucharist. As he wrote on March 27: “…we will wait in vigil, accepting the self-denial it requires of us. Allowing the space to be filled with our sorrow, our desiring, and our prayers.”
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