FROM BROTHER DAMIEN JOSEPH SSF: RAZORS, GRATITUDE & HOPE

I was taking our dog, Annie, on her final walk for the day one Monday night, along cold wet streets with a now gently falling mix of snow and rain.  I passed …

FROM THE RECTOR: 150TH PATRONAL FEAST
On Monday, December 9, 2019, we will celebrate the 150th patronal feast, the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (transferred), of the Society of the Free Church of St. Mary the Virgin. Morning Prayer will be sung at 8:30 AM. The Noonday Office will be prayed at 12:00 PM and a Sung Mass will be celebrated at 12:10 PM. There will be an organ recital at 5:30 PM by Ms. Janet Yieh, Trinity Church, New York City. The Right Reverend Andrew M.L. Dietsche, the bishop of New York, will be celebrant and preacher for the Solemn Mass at 6:00 PM. A reception in Saint Joseph’s Hall follows the Eucharist.

FROM THE STEWARDSHIP COMMITTEE: THIS YEAR & EVERY YEAR

The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin will be entering its 150th year on December 8, 2019, and the Board of Trustees, clergy and staff are planning the many ways we intend to mark this milestone. There will be celebrations and distinguished visitors and special music and more. During this special year, the parish will continue to do all of the things we do at Saint Mary’s regardless of the anniversary—worship, witness, fellowship, service.

FROM THE RECTOR: CAROL OSUCHOWSKI SELLE, 1932-2019

Carol Selle died on Sunday, November 10, at Lenox Hill Hospital, near her apartment on Park Avenue. She was eighty-six years old. She had not been able to come to church for several years now. I visited her regularly to bring her Communion and to spend some time with her. I saw her for the last time on Wednesday afternoon, October 30. She was the last of a group of four very remarkable women whose advice and encouragement helped my life unfold. I don't think the four of them were ever in the same room, but I was blessed to know them all. The direct and indirect links among them were many. Let me start with the first of the four whom I came to know, Elizabeth (Betsey) Shaw Bobrinskoy (1927-2008). She was Carol's best friend.

CALENDAR STUDY

The first proofreading of the 2020 Parish Calendar has been completed. Now the corrections need to be made. Then, there will be another proofreading — and then prayers! There are so many details. But when it is finished, I hope it will be of help to everyone who is connected to Saint Mary's.

FROM THE RECTOR: NOVEMBER 2019

November always begins with a lot of worship. One feels it a little less in years when All Saints' and All Souls' both fall in the middle of the week. This year, with November beginning on a Friday, we will have had significant worship daily from the eve of All Saints' Day, All Souls' Day on Saturday, through Sunday, for us at Saint Mary's, the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost.

SPECIAL NOTE: ALL SOULS’ REMEMBRANCES

For a variety of reasons, the All Souls’ mailing to the parish community was mailed on Friday, October 25. The Requiem Masses, remembering by name those we love who are in the nearer presence of God, will be said beginning Monday, November 4, and conclude on Friday, November 8. You will find the schedule below. You can also email your requests to info@stmvnyc.org and to make the traditional All Souls’ offering by going to the “Giving” section of our webpage—click on any of the icons for the cards available for credit or debit. You will have the chance to indicate that by adding a “note”—please let us know if it’s an All Souls’ offering.

FROM THE RECTOR: ON MY MIND

On October 1 I traveled to Tucson, Arizona, to attend the annual conference of the Society of Catholic Priests of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. It was my first visit to Tucson. The physical beauty of the hills and desert was one of many unexpected joys. The host parish this year was Saint Philip’s in the Hill Church. Father Robert Hendrickson, rector, and the parish community were very gracious hosts. The conference theme was “At the Border of Holiness.” As part of the conference we visited Saint Andrew’s Church, Nogales, Arizona, and then traveled to the wall. The Eucharist was celebrated across the street from the wall as all of us faced the wall.

FROM FATHER SMITH: AND SO, PERHAPS, BE KIND

Peter Cole is a poet and translator who divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven. He was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1957, and is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a winner of a so-called "genius grant." Just as Cole moves between Israel and Connecticut, so also does he move with grace and ease between Hebrew and English, between the Jewish cultures of medieval Spain and the Middle East and contemporary life in the United States. In an interview in 2015 in the Paris Review, he described his work as poet and translator as "at heart, the same activity carried out at different points along a spectrum." All this is evident in his book, The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Princeton University Press, 2007), in which he renders medieval Hebrew and Arabic poetry into startlingly beautiful modern-day English.

FROM THE RECTOR: SOME SEPTEMBER CELEBRATIONS

There are two feast days in September that may be celebrated on a Sunday when they fall on a Sunday. They are Holy Cross Day, September 14, and Saint Michael and All Angels, September 29. This year Holy Cross Day is a Saturday, and as is our custom, there will be a Sung Mass on the eve, Friday, September 13, at 6:00 PM, and the 12:10 Eucharist on Saturday, September 14, will be for Holy Cross Day. Saint Michael and All Angels, commonly called “Michaelmas,” falls on Sunday this year. The Sunday Vigil Mass on Saturday, September 28, and the Offices and Eucharists on September 29 will all be Michaelmas celebrations.

FROM FATHER SMITH: AT THE CROSS HER STATION KEEPING

Stabat Mater is a thirteenth-century hymn, the text of which consists of a meditation on Mary’s experience of the suffering and death of her Son. Its author may be either the Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi (1230–1306) or Pope Innocent III (1161–1216). Here at Saint Mary’s we mostly associate the hymn with the season of Lent, when we sing the hymn on Fridays as we walk the Stations of the Cross.

FROM THE RECTOR: SHADOWS OF ROME

In 1996, Paul Bradshaw published “The Liturgical Consequences of Apostolicae curae for Anglican Ordination Rites” (Anglican Theological Review 78 [1996], 75–86). When I came to the diocese of New York, it was then the practice at our cathedral to ignore the placement of the Prayer Book rubric that says, “The new priest is now vested according to the order of priests.” Instead of following the prayer of consecration as ordered by the Prayer Book (page 534), the prayer itself was stopped after the bishop laid on hands and said, “Therefore, father, though Jesus Christ your Son, give your Holy Spirit to N.; fill him with grace and power, and make him a priest in your Church” (page 533). After vesting all of the ordinands, the bishop completed the prayer. The problem, of course, is that theologically for Anglicans, there is no “moment of consecration” in the celebration of our Sacraments (Baptism and Eucharist) or sacramental rites (Confirmation, Holy Matrimony, Reconciliation of a Penitent, Unction of the Sick, and Ordination). This is an example of the long shadows, as it were, taken on by Anglicans after the 1896 papal encyclical Apostolicae Curae: On the Nullity of Anglican Orders.