The Episcopal Church and Pocahontas Welcomes You

New York Times ad notes Episcopal Church history, mission

May 14, 2007

[Episcopal News Service] The op-ed page of May 12 editions of The New York Times carried a display ad marking the beginnings, 400 years ago, of the Jamestown Colony and the Episcopal Church's heritage and mission in North America.

A pdf of the ad is available here.

The Episcopal Church
Marking a Milestone,
Moving Forward

Somewhere near you, there’s a blue-and-white sign bearing the familiar slogan: The Episcopal Church Welcomes You. It represents some 7,400 congregations that trace their beginnings in North America to a small but hopeful group of English Christians who arrived May 14, 1607 at a place they called Jamestown — the first permanent
English settlement in the New World.

You may know us as Washington’s monumental National Cathedral, site of historic services and ceremonies, or
the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, still unfinished, but already the largest cathedral in the world.

But the Episcopal Church is also Boston’s Old North Church, founded in 1723 and made famous by serving as the beacon for Paul Revere’s revolution-spurring “midnight ride.” And Philadelphia’s Christ Church, home parish of 15 signers of the Declaration of Independence, host to the first General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 1785.

It’s Trinity Parish on Wall Street in New York, formed in 1698, and St. Paul’s Chapel just down the street, frequented by George Washington and the spiritual healing center of Ground Zero since September 11, 2001.

It’s also Epiphany Church in Los Angeles, where Cesar Chavez rallied the United Farmworkers. And Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Cumberland, Maryland, whose basement was a major stop on the Underground Railroad to freedom for enslaved African-Americans. And St. John’s Church in Greenwich Village, a meeting place for gay and lesbian action following the 1969 Stonewall uprising.

It’s a parish in Iowa. A campus ministry in Georgia. A mission in Dinétah — the Navajo Reservation. A cathedral in Utah. Even a house church in Vermont.

Wherever you find us, you’ll find the Book of Common Prayer and a Christian faith that honors and engages the Bible, the tradition of the Church, and God-given human reason.

Joined in prayer, you’ll find people with many points of view — Christians who are progressive, moderate, and conservative — yet who value the diversity of their faith community.

That’s a heritage drawn from our deep roots in nearly 2,000 years of English Christianity, and shared by a world-wide Anglican Communion that unites nearly 80 million people in 164 countries through prayer and ministries committed to caring for “the least of these,” as Jesus commanded, by reducing poverty, disease, and oppression.

Episcopalians struggle with the same issues that trouble all people of faith: how to interpret an ancient faith for today… how to maintain the integrity of tradition while reaching out to a hurting world… how to disagree and yet love and respect one another.

Occasionally those struggles make the news. People find they can no longer walk with us on their journey, and may be called to a different spiritual home. Some later make their way back, and find they are welcomed with open arms.

Despite the headlines, the Episcopal Church keeps moving forward in mission — in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, as well as congregations in Belgium, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Guam, Haiti, Honduras, Italy, Micronesia, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, Taiwan, Venezuela, and the Virgin Islands. We’re committed to a transformed world, as Jesus taught: a world of justice, peace, wholeness, and holy living.

We’ve grown a lot in 400 years, since that 1607 worship service from the Book of Common Prayer was held in Jamestown — inside and out. Come see for yourself. Come and visit… come and explore… come and grow.


The Episcopal Church welcomes you

www.episcopalchurch.org
www.comeandgrow.org

Bicycle in Baghdad

" What can I do with a bicycle in Baghdad ? "

That's what a young Iraqi boy said to Lara Logan, CBS' senior Iraq correspondent, when she asked him why he had sold his bike.

Can you imagine ? Before the US invasion of Iraq children could play in their neighborhoods and ride their bicycles.

Now even their parents are afraid to walk in their neigborhoods without a rifle or arms of some sort. They often didn't even own a rifle before the invasion.

I know, I know there are some of you who will say "Well, Saddam probably wouldn't even let them have rifles.

Even if that's so they weren't afraid to walk in their neighborhoods after dark. They went to worship whether they were Muslim (Sunni or Shiite) or Christian without fear. They lived in the same neighborhoods, shopped in the same shops, went to soccer games together.

Just after the invasion a Chaldean Catholic priest said he expected everything to be fine for all religions after the war just as they had been before. Now everyone who can leave Iraq does. The Christian community that had been there like that in Palestine since the 1st century AD is dwindling down to nothing.

This is what we have done to Iraq.

The ABC/BBC/USAToday poll that came out this past week has most Iraqis saying they wish we had never come, that Saddam was still in power.

Only 42 percent of Iraqis say life is better now than it was under Saddam Hussein.

In countries where there have been dictators or totalitarian rule of one sort or another where the USA hasn't interfered democracy has blossomed. It's been home grown.

In Iran where we put in the late Shah's family we have rule by the Ayatollahs.

Zina Abdulhameed Rajab, a Shiite doctor, said "Whenever I watch my kids laughing or playing, I can't be so happy from inside my heart because I don't know what the next day will bring. I really regret the birth of my kids here."

The Admiral's Ghost

I tell you a tale to-night
Which a seaman told to me,
With eyes that gleamed in the lanthorn light
And a voice as low as the sea.

You could almost hear the stars
Twinkling up in the sky,
And the old wind woke and moaned in the spars
And the same old waves went by.

Singing the same old song
As ages and ages ago,
While he froze my blood in that deep-sea night
With the things he seemed to know.

A bare foot pattered on deck;
Ropes creaked; then-all grew still,
And he pointed his finger straight in my face
And growled, as a sea-dog will.

'Do 'ee know who Nelson was?
That pore little shrivelled form
With the patch on his eye and the pinned-up sleeve
And a soul like a North Sea storm?

'Ask of the Devonshire men!
They know, and they'll tell you true;
He wasn't the pore little chawed-up chap
That Hardy thought he knew.

'He wasn't the man you think!
His patch was a dern disguise!
For he knew that they'd find him out, d'you see,
If they looked him in both his eyes.

'He was twice as big as he seemed;
But his clothes were cunningly made.
He'd both of his hairy arms alright!
The sleeve was a trick of the trade.

'You've heard of sperrits, no doubt;
Well there's more in the matter than that!
But he wasn't the patch and he wasn't the sleeve,
And he wasn't the laced cocked-hat.

'Nelson was just-a Ghost!
You may laugh! But the Devonshire men
They knew that he'd come when England called,
And they know that he'll come again.

'I'll tell you the way it was
(For none of the landsmen know) ,
And to tell it you right, you must go a-starn
Two hundred years or so.

* * * * * * *

'The waves were lapping and slapping
The same as they are today;
And Drake lay dying aboard his ship
In Nobre Dios Bay.

'The scent of foreign flowers
Came floating all around;
'But I'd give my soul for the smell o' the pitch, '
Says he, 'in Plymouth Sound.

''What shall I do, ' he says,
'When the guns begin to roar,
An' England wants me, and me not there
To shatter 'er fores once more? '

'(You've heard what he said, maybe,
But I'll mark you the p'ints again;
For I want you to box your compass right
And get my story plain.)

' 'You must take my drum', he says,
'To the old sea-wall at home;
And if ever you strike that drum, ' he says,
'Why, strike me blind, I'll come!

''If England needs me, dead
Or living, I'll rise that day!
I'll rise from the darkness under the sea
Ten thousand miles away.'

'That's what he said; and he died;
An' his pirates, listenin' roun'
With their crimson doublets and jewelled swords
That flashed as the sun went down.

'They sewed him up in his shroud
With a round-shot top and toe,
To sink him under the salt-sharp sea
Where all good seamen go.

'They lowered him down in the deep,
And there in the sunset light
They boomed a broadside over his grave,
As meaning to say 'Good night.'

'They sailed away in the dark
To the dear little isle they knew;
And they hung his drum by the old sea-wall
The same as he told them to.

* * * * * * *

'Two hundred years went by,
And the guns began to roar,
And England was fighting hard for her life,
As ever she fought of yore.

''It's only my dead that count, '
She said, as she says today;
'It isn't the ships and it isn't the guns
'Ull sweep Trafalgar's Bay.'

'D'you guess who Nelson was?
You may laugh, but it's true as true!
There was more in that pore little chawed-up chap
Than ever his best friend knew.

'The foe was creepin' close,
In the dark, to our white-cliffed isle;
They were ready to leap at England's throat,
When-O, you may smile, you may smile;

'But-ask of the Devenshire men;
For they heard in the dead of night
The roll of a drum, and they saw him pass
On a ship all shining white.

'He stretched out his dead cold face
And he sailed in the grand old way!
The fishes had taken an eye and his arm,
But he swept Trafalgar's Bay.

'Nelson-was Francis Drake!
O, what matters the uniform,
Or the patch on your eye or your pinned-up sleeve,
If your soul's like a North Sea storm? '

Alfred Noyes (Roman Catholic)