Dear Friends,
Here we are starting Lent again. What are our initial thoughts/feelings with a move into Lent? Perhaps very little response – ‘we’ve done this so many times……’; maybe a feeling of challenge – will it be significant for me this year – can I make it significant? Am I fearful of challenge? Or maybe an openness to how it will unfold for me ……. Whatever you are experiencing as you look towards this next period, we hope that some of what we send you over the coming six weeks will help you to respond positively.
There is a long litany, ‘ Lenten Litany on Fasting and Feasting’ – too long to be helpful taken as a whole – so we thought we would send you a short section each week through to the end of Lent.
Our blessing this week will be ‘Dona Nobis’ from, Marty Haugen’s CD, ‘The Song & the Silence’
With our love
For those who join us for Evening Prayer, please note there won’t be a zoom on Thursday 22 Feb. (Thursday in the first week of Lent), nor will there be ‘live’ Evening Prayer in Blessed Sacrament on Tues 20 & Wed 21 Feb.
An Invocation for Lent
Into a dark world
a snowdrop comes,
a benison
of hope and peace,
carrying within it
a green heart,
symbol of God’s renewing love.
Come to inhabit our darkness
Lord Christ,
for dark and light
are alike to you.
May nature’s white candles of hope
remind us of your birth
and light our journey
through Lent and beyond.
Kate McIlhagga
Lenten Psalm of Awakening
Come, O life-giving Creator,
and rattle the door latch of my slumbering heart.
Awaken me as you breathe upon a winter-wrapped earth,
gently calling to life virgin Spring.
Awaken in these fortified days of Lenten prayer and discipline my youthful dream of holiness.
Call me forth from the prison camp
of my numerous past defeats
and my narrow patterns of being
to make my ordinary life extra-ordinarily alive,
through the passion of my love.
Show to me during these Lenten days
how to take the daily things of life
and by submerging them in the sacred,
to infuse them with a great love for you, O God,
and for others.
Guide me to perform simple acts of love and prayer
the real works of reform and renewal
of this overture to the spring of the Spirit.
O Father of Jesus, Mother of Christ, help me not to waste these precious Lenten days of my soul’s spiritual springtime.
Edward Hays
The raising to new life of our humanness is most often expressed and affirmed in small things: in quiet undemonstrative kindness, in tentative reaching out across many kinds of barriers, in resistance against all kinds of dehumanization and demonization, in persistence against the odds, in continuing to create out of destruction, in the imagination of joy and wonder, and in triumphs, however small, of justice. Our aim should be to be people who bear witness to the power of love against the love of power, and who keep alive the rumour that somewhere there is singing, somewhere people dance, and everywhere, even in the darkest of places, love rises up unconquerable to meet us again.
Kathy Galloway
Fast from judging others; Feast on the Christ indwelling them.
Fast from emphasis on differences; Feast on the unity of all life.
Fast from apparent darkness; Feast on the reality of light.
Fast from thoughts of illness; Feast on the healing power of God.