Dear All,
Coronation Day! Let’s hope that it is a good day for celebrations!
Our reflections today don’t directly focus on the significant aspects of this event. I think in the weeks leading up to today there has been a wealth of material on this theme via the media and anyway it isn’t an event that pleases everyone so we continue with our Eastertide weeks. Sometimes people speak of the weeks ‘after’ Easter but really it is the weeks of Easter. This emphasises the importance of Easter – we enjoy Easter for seven weeks – longer than Lent! Our attachments stay on the Easter theme, more or less – we have added in a poem by Thomas Aldrich – it is beautiful – full of May & the beauty of tiny happenings!
Our blessing this week is Rutter’s Clare Blessing – we hope you enjoy it – let’s pray it all involved in the Coronation, especially our king – may the spirit of commitment & service that we saw in his mother be very evident in his years as monarch.
With love & prayer
Reflecting on the Resurrection
Amanda Dillon
Easter stands at the very heart of our faith. It is the central pivot around which everything we know & believe about Jesus the Christ turns & has meaning. Christ’s emergence from the tomb, his victory over violence & death, is God’s ultimate endorsement of everything he lived for & taught in his earthly ministry. Not military power, nor religious fundamentalism, nor political machinations, could destroy Jesus & his claim to Sonship. His Resurrection is God’s final word : transfiguration & resurrection. All shall be changed, transfigured, glorified! We are given a clear image of what ultimately awaits us in God! The seed of resurrection has been planted in us for the entire creation about his relationship to God. In Christ God discloses his ultimate plan & all our being is destined for God. Everything about Jesus & all his teaching must now be viewed through his prism of glorified, resurrected life. All of his counter-cultural, counter intuitive messages about self-emptying, turning the other cheek, surrender & love, fall into place & acquire ever deepening meaning against the startling revelation of the empty tomb! This is the starting point of Christian faith – this is the promise held out to us. We should be rendered speechless at the mind-bending enormity of it. It demands that we recalibrate our world-view & change, change, change! Our task, enlivened, inspired & strengthened by God’s Spirit, is to take this mind=blowing impact of Christ’s Resurrection into a suffering & broken world. Easter opens the door to the great cosmic banquet to which all are invited by the Lord. Our job is to model our lives & behaviour on Jesus, to go out & to leaven the dough, to love & to serve, forgive & heal, feed & clothe & in all we do be worthy of being the Body of Christ.
What Would the Future Be?
They just stood
Still,
With their spice-filled baskets,
Starring, horrified,
Eyes out into the deep emptiness
Of the garden tomb,
(Tombs hold their dead)
Wits frozen,
Feet rooted to the ground;
The sheer incongruence of it all,
The terror of impossibility!
Memories of promise,
Heard but not believed,
Hung in the morning sun.
What if it were true?
What would the future be?
Source Unknown
Open Your Eyes
Daniel O’Leary
I have long wondered why the Risen Jesus was unrecognised by Mary & the disciples. But something clicked in my heart as I recently listened to the Dominican, Timothy Ratcliffe. It wasn’t, he said, that they knew Jesus before & did not recognise him now. It was more that they never really knew him, or rather, as Herbert McCabe put it, ‘they thought they knew him’ and now they were meeting the real Jesus as if for the first time. The miracle of Easter was already opening their eyes. The blindfold preventing them from fully recognising him was now being removed. Love was bringing clear vision. It was transforming the blurred, the false; it was revealing the real, the beautiful. For one bright moment they glimpsed pure truth.
Memory
Thomas Aldrich writes of the moment the eyes of his heart were blessed with true sight.
My mind lets go a thousand things,
Like dates of wars & deaths of kings,
And yet recalls the very hour –
Twas noon by yonder village tower,
and on the last blue noon in May –
the wind came briskly up this way,
crisping the brook beside the road;
then, pausing here, let down its load
of pine-scents, & shook listlessly
two petals from the wild rose-tree.