Each week of the liturgical year, a reading from Second Advent Scripture is delivered as part of the Saturday Communion of Fellowship Service held in the Chapel of the Holy Child. This reading follows the Sacred Calendar of the Church; that is, Prophecies and Revelations that have been received by The Church on sacred dates are recalled in a liturgical context during the appropriate season each year. This reading is delivered just before the final blessings. Each service also includes a reading from the ancient scriptures, prayers, or wisdom sayings of various world religions past and present and is usually thematically related to the Second Advent Reading. This reading is delivered by the Reader right after the announcements that begin the service and is thus the first reading of the service. An audio recording of the reading from Second Advent Scripture delivered on the date above is provided here below together with a transcript of the first reading of the service that day.
Click here to watch this week’s readings on YouTube. (12:51 minutes)
SECOND ADVENT PROPHECY AND REVELATION
A Reading from the Prophecy on the Golden Age of Light and the Nation of Nations, Chapter 84: “On the Golden Age of Light and the Nation of Nations” (pp. 733-741).
ANCIENT SCRIPTURE AND WISDOM SAYINGS
A Reading from the 4th-century BC Daoist Writings of the Sage Chuang-Tzu:
How complete was [the operation of the Tâo] in the people of old! It made them the equals of spiritual beings, and subtle and all-embracing as heaven and earth. They nourished all things, and produced harmony under heaven. Their beneficent influence reached to all classes of the people. . . . Great and small, fine and coarse—all felt their presence and operation. Their intelligence, as seen in all their regulations, was handed down from age to age in their old laws, and much of it was still to be found in the [writings of the] Historians.
But there ensued great disorder in the world, and sages and worthies no longer shed their light on it. The Tâo and its characteristics ceased to be regarded as uniform. Many in different places got one glimpse of it, and congratulated themselves on possessing it as a whole. They might be compared to the ear, the eye, the nose, or the mouth. Each sense has its own faculty, but their different faculties cannot be interchanged. So it was with the many branches of the various schools. Each had its peculiar excellence, and there was a time for it; but notwithstanding no one covered or extended over the whole [range of truth]. . . . Thus it was that the Tâo, which inwardly forms the sage and outwardly the king, became obscured and lost its clearness, became repressed and lost its development. Every one in the world did whatever he wished and was the rule to himself. Alas! the various schools held on to their several ways, and could not come back to the same point, nor agree together. The students of that later age unfortunately did not see the undivided purity of heaven and earth, and the great scheme of truth held by the ancients. The system of the Tâo was about to be torn into fragments under all of heaven.
Radheka Patel Savoy
Click here to watch this week’s readings on YouTube. (12:51 minutes)
