VOLUME 68 NUMBER 6
06/01/2018
FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE Your Parish Newsletter in Print—JUNE 2018
Sent Via Email to all Parishioners on The Parish Email List
SAINT MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS EPISCOPAL CHURCH 3233 PACIFIC VIEW DRIVE CORONA DEL MAR, CA 92625 www.stmikescdm.ladiocese.org 949-644-463
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WITH AN OCEAN VIEW
we are in lasting, secure, growing relationship with God, our lives have a sense of meaning and order and growth and purpose. We sense some overarching pattern behind who we are and where we are going. On the other hand, if our relationship with God is non-existent, or superficial, or in danger of being crowded out of our vision by other pressing concerns and goals, the different aspects of our personalities begin to vie with one another. Our gifts and interests and goals and talents cease to function in harmony, and we find ourselves at war with ourselves. The disparate voices in our lives and souls lead us into greater disorder and inner struggle because we lack the unifying power, the “magnetic north,” of God in our lives.
By The Revd Michael Seiler Interim Rector
DISCOVERING THE HOLY SPIRIT AT PENTECOST One of the basic teachings of the Christian faith is that human beings are made in the image of God. As Christians, we believe that our humanity, our personhood, the unique individuality which each one of us possesses, is a gift from God. Who we are is not a mere accident of genetics or biochemistry; each one of us is, rather, a very particular and “one-of-a-kind” revelation of the image of God. Who you are – the image of God in you - reveals some special aspect or facet of who God is, an aspect or facet of God that only you can reveal. I, and only I, can reveal some other tiny feature of the glory of God’s being in my own particular way also. So it is for all of us, each with our own special gifts, foibles, strengths, and weaknesses.
Fifty days after the resurrection, at Pentecost, the first Christians suddenly discovered something very radical and new about themselves. They suddenly found something – Someone - within them that was deeper than will or intellect, deeper than emotion or passion, deeper than (to use our modern terms) the conscious or the unconscious mind. They suddenly discovered, in the very depths of their being, God’s presence in a whole new way. Jesus had spoken to them of the Holy Spirit, who was with them and “would be in them.” They now began to experience the filling and
One aspect of our being created “in the image of God” is that our personalities were designed by God to flourish in relationship to him. When 1