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Our Sunday gathering does liturgy lite, and Lent doesn’t feature much on our community radar. So it’s good to be reminded from time to time of seasons and why they’re helpful. The current season is brilliantly summed up in the Eucharistic preface for Lent:
in these forty days
you lead us into the desert of repentence
that through a pilgrimage of prayer and discipline
we may grow in grace
and learn to be your people again.
Through fasting prayer and acts of service
you bring us back to your generous heart.
Through the study of your holy word
you open our eyes to your presence in the world
and free our hands to welcome others
into the radiant splendour of your love.
Big cheer to Big Bulky Anglican
The Eucharistic words balance belief and doing, giving up and geting going, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, right thoughts and right actions . The mighty Ship of Fools has 40 Lent ideas to act on. Today’s, (31st of Lent) is for random acts of kindness.
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves
as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
Don’t search for the answers,
which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is to love everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then,
someday far in the future,
you will gradually,
without even noticing it,
live your way into the answers.
From ‘Letter Four‘ of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
There have been times
when, after long on my knees
in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled
from my mind, and I have looked
in and seen the old questions lie
folded and in place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of love’s risen body.
from R S Thomas’ poem The Answer
Got trapped by enforced hospitality around MOTD on Saturday and missed the moon going into the red.
So in the style of MOTD, an action reply without Gary Lineker is Jonas Thomén’s Flickr space where you can watch it happen again.
Detail from the masthead of The Godzdogz blog. It’s from a stained glass window in a private chapel in Caleruega, Spain, the birthplace of St Dominic.
The blog is of the English Dominican student body and there’s a reason for the candle carrying canine.
‘The name ‘Dominican‘, although derived from the name of our holy father and Founder, St Dominic , is also a pun on the Latin phrase “Domini canes” which means ‘Dogs of the Lord.’
This was itself based on a dream which St Dominic’s mother, Blessed Juana de Aza, had in 1170 when she was pregnant: she saw a black and white dog with a torch in its mouth setting the world ablaze. This was interpreted to refer to St Dominic and his spiritual children, the Dominican Order – in their black and white habits – whose preaching brings the light of Gospel truth to shine upon and inflame the world with divine love.’
Blessed are those who are seen to be different,
for they will make the difference
Blessed are the excluded
for they will be included
Blessed are the vulnerable
they shall have strength
Blessed are the troubled of heart and mind,
they shall find peace
Blessed are the persecuted
they will find freedom
Printed on a Jesuit Volunteers coffee mug at a project where I was trustee.
