July 17

Beloved of Good Shepherd Church

Grace to you and peace in Jesus Christ our Lord!

Good Shepherd’s Choir (the Angel Choir as I affectionately call them) has been chosen to serve a week-long residency at Wells Cathedral in Wells, England. It is quite an honor to have been selected, and their journey is going to be an amazing adventure. And I get to go with them happily riding on their coattails! While our current worship space is approaching 100 years old Wells Cathedral is around 800 years old. It has been referred to as one of the “most beautiful and most poetic” of the English cathedrals and is reported to welcome nearly 300,000 pilgrims each year. Our choir will sing at a service nearly every day that we are abroad, with me and a small troupe of GSEC parishioners tagging along.

This trip is a spiritual pilgrimage which is a journey one takes to deepen one’s relationship with God. On a pilgrimage we let go of our usual way of doing things, put down that which is familiar and enter into something new and different in order to disrupt our habitual way of being. So we’ll meet new people, worship in a different church, and walk unfamiliar paths on the opposite side of the Atlantic all in the hopes of delving deeper into love with God and our neighbors. I am particularly intrigued by the fact that we will be in a church that was built before the English Reformation. Therefore, it was originally Roman Catholic. God works through all our changes and remains buried as an endlessly benevolent presence in the church across the ages. 

So, maybe you’re not going to England on pilgrimage this summer, but I wonder if you can carve out a little time to make a spiritual pilgrimage of some sort? All you need to do is set aside some time to do something different to make yourself vulnerable to God in some small, new way. You could go out to Gethsemane for the afternoon, or Shaker Village, or come down to Good Shepherd sometime soon and spend a quiet hour in your own worship space on a day you wouldn’t normally do so. Of course, you don’t have to go anywhere to make a spiritual pilgrimage. Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection says “your heart is a chapel.” Just set aside some time with no agenda other than spending time with God in a new way. 

Remember this always - God loves you, and I love you too!

Love is all,

Hendree+