Two Weeks to Go!!

Welcome to my blog! I’m glad you’ve found your way here - Leave me comments and let me know who you are, I`m greatly indebted to you all for taking an interest, so Thank You! I`m Nick. I’ve been struggling over the past few weeks trying to come up with a creative way to explain the blog title; alas, it’s simply taking far too long and what I have to say sounds way to academic-like – that’s to say, not at all interesting! So here we go, my first post. And now, at long last, I can send everyone the long promised – (and of COURSE much anticipated!) EmptyMountainEchoes – Nick’s Lambeth blog url!

This evening we here in Montreal hosted the opening service of the Joint-Anglican-Lutheran-Worship-Conference:-Order-and-Chaos. It’s a long title, but certainly apropos (look at that French!) if you were there to see the break-dancing and hear the whistles and wash the numbers off your hands. It was an exciting event and I’m sure the conference will go quite well for the rest of the week. It’s in the Cathedral! How could it not :)?

Well, let me just say that, even if I don’t fully explain the blog title here, I think the theme of the conference certainly summarizes it well. The processes of life are in flux - constantly. Order and Chaos intertwine, they weave in and out of one another and out of this mixture comes creation. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.” (Genesis 1.1-3) Understanding that darkness as chaos, as it’s so often been defined before, we come to understand that even primordially, before anything in this universe, order came out of chaos (who said ex-nihilo was Biblical?). Just as order and chaos interrelate, so we too interrelate, and change, and move. ‘In God we live and move and have our being.’ We are not static, and neither is our church; we are constantly changing, breathing, inspiring, being inspired. God moves us where God will. It’s in this sense that we are empty. We are empty of an independent existence: independence of each other, of other traditions, of the world at large. That is to say, we are fundamentally connected and shaped by all of these; except, we take up Christ as our sure foundation, our cornerstone. Only in the living and active God are we at home, are we solid, and yet even there, God never stops moving: order… chaos… life goes on…

Peace and Blessings,
Nick.