Thought For The Week

This week I wrote the Thought for the Week column for Berwick Advertiser.  Here it is:

Churches are zooming into new ways during the lock-down, with worship and ‘tea and cake’ on-line. One church emails its regular week-day worshippers with inspiring pieces by those who usually lead it. Donations to our food bank, and names of isolated or unwell people who would value a phone call are part of these new ways.  Holy Trinity Berwick and probably other churches, rings its bell at 8.0 pm on Thursdays to join with all the clappers for the NHS staff in the streets around. I bang my frying pan!

I find these Five P’s help me during the lock-down: 1) Projects 2) Prayer pauses 3) Persons (by internet, phone or the front door) 4) Physicals (creative exercises)  5 )Perusing (e.g. reading, viewing or writing a diary).

The retreats at The Open Gate, Holy Island, which my Community of Aidan and Hilda sponsor, are cancelled.  But I have already put details of our Aidan and Hilda Week Zoom Retreat on my website http://www.raysimpson.org/blog/book-the-aidan-and-hilda-week-retreat

Students from the USA Fuller Seminary asked me to put the talk I would have given them last week on to You Tube. It is about ‘Post-Covid Society and Celtic Christianity’. Following this pandemic the world – and its religions – must seek to restore all creation as a Communion with its Creator, and churches must become indigenous networks that restore daily prayer and deeds of mercy as a way of life.

Thank God the Garden Centres are now open.  My back yard is full of colour and chirping birds.