The Episcopal Church in Western Washington
The Great Fifty Days of Easter For the secular world, Easter is a one day celebration of spring, for finding brightly colored eggs and sporting new spring finery. For the Church, Easter is the center of our faith and of our year, a great festival of fifty glorious days stretching from the Easter Vigil through Pentecost, a celebration of the resurrection of Christ and the sending of the Holy Spirit. This spacious fifty-day feast affords us the time we need
ASH WEDNESDAY AND LENT “Eternal Lord of love, behold your Church walking once more the pilgrim way of Lent . . .” (The Hymnal 1982 # 149) As the hymn above suggests, Lent is a communal pilgrimage, a journey of the whole Church following Jesus on the road to Jerusalem, to his Passion and death, and to his resurrection, under the watchful, loving protection of God. Lent is traditionally the time of preparation for baptism at the Easter Vigil, and
Today we remember the lives of two remarkable men in the history of the Episcopal Church – the Rev. Thomas Gallaudet and the Rev. Henry Winter Syle. Gallaudet established the first deaf Epsicopal congregation and Syle, one of Gallaudet’s students, was the first deaf Episcopal priest. Both men lived out the church’s calling to respond to human need with loving service and to transform the unjust structures of our society. From a young age, Gallaudet’s father had wanted to become
Today we celebrate the Feast of Florence Nightingale, the nurse and social reformer who helped revolutionize patient care and is widely recognized as the founder of modern nursing. Though her views on religion were unorthodox, she became a member of the Church of England later in life and devoted herself to serving God. At seventeen, she wrote in her diary that “God spoke to me and called me to his service,” though she had no clear picture of how that