Category: Speaking to the Soul

When Occum left the Island, another Indian, Peter John, became a faithful native preacher to his brethren. He ministered among them until his grandson, the Rev. Paul Cuffee, entered the sacred calling. He was the second of seven sons of Peter Cuffee, an Indian of the Shinnecock tribe, and born in Brookhaven, in 1757. He embraced Christianity in 1778-9, and made Canoe Place his home where he lived. His mother was of African descent, and very pious.

Christ, whose glory fills the skies,

Christ, the true, the only light,

Sun of Righteousness, arise,

Triumph o’er the shades of night:

Day-spring from on high, be near:

Day-star, in my heart appear.

Another side of this understanding of the burial of the saints is the respect of the Anglo-Saxons for the bones of the ‘new’ saints and the accounts of miracles at their tombs. The converts buried their dead to await the resurrection rather than burning them, and beside these bones the poor and sick were healed.

The monastic community built in the Lord’s name a fine monastery in the place that the angel had previously shown them. When this was finished the holy father decreed such austerity in his zeal for the monastic ideal that every monk toiled at his daily work and spent his life in manual labor for the good of the community.

Each succeeding year, Lent calls each of us to renew our ongoing commitment to the implications of the Resurrection in our own lives, here and now. But that demands both the healing of the soul and the honing of the soul, both penance and faith, both a purging of what is superfluous in our lives and the heightening, the intensifying, of what is meaningful.

These are thy wonders, Lord of love,

To make us see we are but flowers that glide:

Which when we once can finde and prove,

Thou hast a garden for us where to bide.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Society of Companions of the Holy Cross, Father J. O. S. Huntington, O.H.C., conducted a Retreat. At the last breakfast, at which Emily Malbone Morgan, Founder of the Society, was not present, Father Huntington spoke as follows: “I am glad that Miss Morgan is not with us this morning,

There is an Episcopal minister in charge of the Indian school here. The school has now seventy-five scholars, and the present gentleman has been mainly instrumental in building it up. He has won my respect and confidence by his unselfish devotion to duty and the pluck and courage and energy he has displayed in meeting and fighting the discouragements in his path.

[Judas must be replaced by] “one of the men who have accompanied us,” continues Peter. Note how he requires them to be eyewitnesses, even though the Spirit was about to come. There was still great care concerning this: “One of the men who have accompanied us,” he says, “during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us.” He means those who had dwelt with Christ, not simply been present as disciples. . . .

I urge all of you to obey the word of righteousness and to practice all endurance, which you also observed with your own eyes not only in the most fortunate Ignatius, Zosimus, and Rufus, but also in others who lived among you, and in Paul himself and the other apostles. You should be convinced that none of them acted in vain, but in faith and righteousness, and that they are in the place they deserved, with the Lord, with whom they also suffered.