WELCOME TO ST STEPHEN’S
First, some truth in advertising. Those of us who call St Stephen’s home have reasons to. One of them is the congenial and indulgently simple belief that your life is not our business, and neither is ours. Elizabeth I described a character trait of Anglican piety when she said, “We don’t open windows on men’s souls.” So there; we’re showing you our hand. It’s part of what we mean when we say that St Stephen’s is ‘loose around the edges and solid at the core’.
How can this be? We’ve got as much to be busy about and responsible for as anyone. And the unvarnished truth is that much of the time we spend our profoundly ordinary, humdrum days acting either as if there is no God, or as if God exists the way the Golden Gate Bridge does or the De Young Museum, the way Lake Tahoe, Napa Valley, Muir Woods, and your chaise longue exists.
WHAT IS RELIGION?
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, is a book about a group of small, vocal animals who lived once upon a time on the banks of the stripling Thames in Oxfordshire. There is one rather famous chapter in the book called “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” and the way the chapter begins is roughly this. A family of otters discovers that a small, fat, otter child named Portly is missing. Rat, who is a water rat, and Mole, who is a mole, decide to go search for him in Rat’s boat, and off they go one morning just before daybreak.
Strange things begin to happen. Rat suddenly hears a scrap of music such as he has never heard before, and then before he knows it, it’s gone. “So beautiful and strange and new,” Rat sings (and since these are British animals you have to imagine the British accent). Rat also has a rather flowery way of expressing himself. . .
Sunday Services
AT 8:00 AM & 10:00 AM, 3 Bayview Ave, Belvedere, CA
next steps?
Our hope is that you will connect with St Stephen’s Church in a meaningful way, finding community and purpose.