Dear All,
Today is such a special day but so often overlooked as we get over Good Friday & prepare for Easter Sunday. We all experience Holy Saturday in our lives, whether we know it or not. The waiting, the disappointment, the guilt, and so much more. Our reflections focus mainly on Holy Saturday but also we have allowed ourselves a glimpse into the Resurrection that we will develop next week. Meanwhile rest in Holy Saturday & then enjoy the amazing feast of Easter.
The blessing this week is ‘Deep Peace’ from Sacred Pathways – we hope you enjoy it & that you have deep peace this Holy Saturday and over the next days.
With our love & prayer for you over Easter,
Moira & Margaret
Information:
For those who join us for Evening Prayer:
- In person at Blessed Sacrament Church: we will not be there this coming week on Tuesday, 24th or Wednesday 25th – we will be there in Holy Week, Tuesday 31st & Wednesday 1st April. We won’t be there in Easter week, Tuesday 7th & Wednesday 8th but we will be back again on Tuesday 14th & Wednesday 15th.
- Zoom: we won’t be zooming from Thursday 2nd until Thursday 16th April.
Easter 2026 – If you might be interested in spending the Easter weekend with us at New Hall, please look on our website for details – ‘Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre’. It can be fully or partly residential – Maundy Thursday afternoon until after Easter Sunday lunch – or you can choose the parts of the programme that fit round other commitments. The liturgies will be creative and participative, and hopefully will relate to our lives and the lives of people across our world with its many areas of conflict.
At New Hall, alongside the main services over the Easter weekend, there will be
- Good Friday 7.30pm in the chapel: Music and readings for Good Friday including extracts from Handel’s Messiah. Either come and sing or just come and listen.
- Reflections on the themes of Holy Saturday. Meet at the school front door 11.15am to walk to the canopy for 11.30am liturgy
Holy Sepulchre/Church of the Resurrection. Jerusalem
With its mud brown walls
No-one could call it
a beautiful church.
(No gold domes, no blue tiles.)
Constantine first built it
over a broken rock,
over a gallows,
over a tomb.
A once fine basilica
was carved up by Crusaders.
Ecclesiastical hierocrats
continue the subdivision.
It houses a collection
of bad religious art,
harbours the crassest of tourists
and their lying guides.
It’s cluttered,
Noisy and dirty,
embracing as it does
the hollow, harried, holy.
This is holy ground,
the soul’s omphalos,
as sacred as it gets
in this veil of tears.
Here God emptied himself.
Good to the last drop
of his precious blood,
here God died.
God’s mother saw it,
the lance, water, blood,
the broken body of her son:
dead, dead, dead.
Here God emptied himself
So completely
that life could rush in.
God emptied himself alive.
Death gave birth to life.
Here life won
once and for all.
No wonder the rock split.
Who can imagine the energy
that empowered a tomb
to swallow a cross
and spit out God.
No one could call it
a beautiful church,
but God emptied himself alive
here, once, for all.
Looking Into the Darkness
As I walk up the hill, I see Jesus falling three times; I witness his encounters with Mary, Simon of Cyrene, Veronica, and the weeping women. I see Jesus robbed of his clothes, nailed to the cross, and dying between two criminals. And I stand in front of the Pieta: Mary holding the dead body of Jesus in her lap. Then the road takes me down again to the bottom of the hill. There I spy a great cave and, in front of it, eleven statues circling the body of Jesus before it is laid in the tomb. I stand there for a long time. As I look into the long, deep, dark cave in the rock and see the body of Jesus carried into that darkness, I want to enter with him and let all my selfish needs and desires, all my violence, resentments, lusts, and petty jealousies be put there, never to be taken up again. I pray for hope, for courage, and, most of all, for trust that the darkness is simply a tunnel and not a final destination. It seems such an endless struggle, and I often wonder if I will ever see the end of this dark passage.
A Quiet Place
As I walk away from the last Station [of the Cross] expecting to find the exit, I turn a corner and suddenly see a huge, round stone. From its center many rays are carved, reaching out to its far edges. It looks like the sun; it speaks of light and freedom. Its simplicity stops me in my tracks. There are no statues, no gestures, no movements. Just a great, round, free-standing boulder. Beside it are these words: “At the first sight of the dawn… they found that the stone had been rolled away.” Turning to the other side of the stone, I read: “He has risen, as he said he would.” An immense solitude and peace come over me. I am quite alone: no people, no statues, no events to think about. Just that huge stone. All the Stations of the Passion, so full of drama and tragedy, seem to be gone. All that remains is this very quiet place – empty, simple, pure, and unpretentious. I had not expected this “fifteenth Station.” It’s not really a Station. It’s more like a gentle reminder, a moment of hope, a small rearrangement of nature. It does not demand my attention as did the life-size figures of the Stations. I can pass it by and let it go unnoticed. But something is happening within me – a leaping up.
On Rolling the Stone Away
Anon
Where are our stones?
What are their names?
Would we know them
if we met them face to face?
And if the empty tomb
we stood in front of was us
would we call it death?
Or would we call it resurrection?
My heart beats out the answer
much clearer than I live it.
Oh happy emptiness!
It’s what we need a lot of
to be full.
Rolling stones
is what it is all about
but resurrection
is another name.
Be patient with each other’s stones
Jesus was gentle with Thomas’s stone
Peter had to roll away some stones in his life too.
The call continues.
We are called
to help others experience resurrection
to help them break open their tombs.
They may be waiting for us.
Of course you understand
that might mean
we’ll have to break forth
from our own tombs first.
We’d look kind of silly
preaching from the
inside of our tombs,
wouldn’t we?