Dear All,
Already we are going into the 2nd week of Lent. It can be a time when we become more aware of our own brokenness or the ‘brokenness’ of our world. So amongst our attachments there is something on that, but we remain conscious that we are on a journey towards the wonderful celebration of Easter – so we mustn’t ever lose sight of hope. If Easter Sunday could follow Good Friday we cannot allow ourselves to lose hope.
Our blessing this week is ‘My Peace’. Let us all pray in hope for peace in our very troubled world as we listen to this blessing.
With love
Information:
For those who zoom with us for Evening Prayer:
There won’t be zoomed Evening Prayer on Sunday 1 March, nor on Thursday 5 March.
Lead us on our Journey
Take us on our journey
from where we are to what you want us to be;
so that we can become a community
where all are welcomed & no-one is excluded,
all are valued & no-one is made to feel inadequate,
all are forgiven & no-one is ashamed to belong,
all are encouraged and no-one is too hurt to come among us.
Lead us on our journey
from who we are to who you want us to be;
so that patience is built into us,
kindness is assumed in us, gentleness is part of us,
compassion flows from us,
truth is second nature to us,
and the commitment of love is part of us.
Let us go gladly on the journey towards Easter –
the journey towards death and resurrection.
Let us journey in the peace and power of the Spirit.
Ruth Harvey
Solitude of Heart
Henri Nouwen
It is probably difficult, if not impossible, to move from loneliness to solitude without any form of withdrawal from a distracting world…. But the solitude that really counts is the solitude of the heart; it is an inner quality or attitude that does not depend on physical isolation…. It seems more important than ever to stress that solitude is one of the human capacities that can exist, be maintained and developed in the center of a big city, in the middle of a large crowd and in the context of a very active and productive life. A man or woman who has developed this solitude of heart is no longer pulled apart by the most divergent stimuli of the surrounding world but is able to perceive and understand this world from a quiet inner centre.
Thoughts on Lent
Joan Chittister
In Lent we can learn the greatest gift of all: freedom from the demands of self for the good of the flowering of the spirit.
It is these things that the great fast, Lent, comes to give us, so that, rather than being persuaded and distracted by the things of the world around us, we can learn to keep our inner eye on the world to come. The asceticism of Lent comes to train us, like spiritual athletes, to keep our eyes, with Jesus, on the road to Jerusalem. Then, perhaps, we will come, like Jesus, to see the sick and the lame, the outcast and the foreigner in our own world and bend to heal them, stop to listen to them, reach out to raise them from the dead edges of society to new life.
Brokenness
Henri Nouwen
The great task is to allow God’s blessing to touch us in our brokenness. Then our brokenness will gradually come to be seen as an opening towards the full acceptance of ourselves as the Beloved of God. This explains why true joy can be experienced in the midst of great suffering. It is the joy of being disciplined, purified & pruned. Just as athletes who experience great pain as they run the race, can, at the same time, taste the joy that they are coming closer to their goal, so also can the Beloved experience suffering as a way to the deeper communion for which they yearn. Here joy & sorrow are no longer each other’s opposites, but have become the two sides of the same desire to grow to the fullness of the Beloved.