Friends

Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee.

Yesterday at a studio concert in Cobble Hill, a small town in the southern end of Vancouver Island, we heard a performance of Britten's canticle setting the words of T.S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi.

Is anyone still with me? There is so much fracturing of communion going on these days, I wonder. I have not been abandoned by my Counselor, in spite of the fact that I can take both Britten and Eliot together.

If anyone has been appointed by the invocation of fellowship-breaking verses like 'Come ye out from among them' then let the same ones also ask whether 'the word of God originated with them'. Is it in the words of the hymn that God should take his power and reign, or that we should say to God, 'let me take your power and reign'?

But they would not listen for their hardness of heart.

Still here? Britten and Eliot are two of my 100 best - in the 20th century. Could I really be receiving the gift of Britten's music and maintain a position of not receiving him? Those who would be great among you should be righteous for more than one day.

It is regrettable perhaps that some have gone out from among us. It remains for me self-evident that the first sin of the flesh is the desire to be right on one's own terms. It is possible for groups of people to share such sin. Too bad.

Now this really is a personal opinion. Those who are leaving, do they recognize that their stance against this and that practice, whether it be acceptance of those who are different from them in desire or the acceptance of the place of people in the Church who have a differing anatomical structure, - do they recognize, I ask, if their very legal stance has not or has contributed to the failure of the Gospel in the very tradition they so long continued in?

Money is a cheap way of writing off the prods of conscience.

What does it matter that "I" am right when I have failed in the Gospel? What does it matter that "I" am right in all my doctrine when I have not known love or been known by love?

Hypocrite - this above all you should have understood. To think I even read any of your books when after all is said and done, you didn't know, and you couldn't bear all things. Don't you even know what God does by the Spirit in the death of Jesus Christ for the sake of those who are belonging to him? If you say you do know this - why can't you say it? Why do you reduce his Gospel to your Law?