What Is More Important Than A Thousand Activities?
I am asked to send reflections to the people who before Covid19 would attend a church service I was due to lead. I began: Thomas Homer-Dixon writes in The Globe and Mail: ‘Today’s emerging pandemic could help catalyse an urgently needed tipping event in humanity’s collective moral values, priorities and sense of self and community. It could remind us of our common fate on a small crowded planet with dwindling resources and fraying natural systems. This highlights the aptness of the prayer the Church of England now asks us to pray in its Daily Morning Prayer: ‘For God’s creation that the people of the earth may meet their responsibility to care’. I concluded: I am finding that these Five P’s help me: 1) Projects 2) Prayer pauses 3) Persons (by internet, phone or the front door) 4) Physicals 5 )Perusing (e.g. reading or viewing).
My project is to complete a long-in-the-making Year Book ‘Re-Imagining Britain and Ireland: 366 Glorified Citizens Tests’ The November 13 entry is on The Church of Ireland. Before completing this page entry I emailed the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Reconciliation Advisor: ‘Can you advise, and also give me any example of an official act of repentance by the Anglican Church in Britain for its record in Ireland?’
An artist from Australia emails me an attachment of the ikon of Our Lady of Silence, which is at Bose Monastery in Italy. Mary gave more to the world through intentional silence than through a thousand activities.
A friend from Scotland emails: ' I’ve read the Pilgrim Way and Aidan of Lindisfarne in the past few weeks and both have been a meeting with God for me in different ways. The Way of Life feels like a “coming home” as I said in a previous email but Aidan of Lindisfarne was quite different. It left me wondering and longing. Can such a white hot faith be fanned again in our land? And could I possibly someone who carries a flame and let’s God take me wherever he needs? Questions I shall explore with my spiritual director.
May I also humbly recommend the podcast “This Cultural Moment”. I read of Aiden of Lindisfarne and listened to episodes from “This Cultural Moment” side by side over the last few days. I was stuck by how much Aidan’s context and mine are similar. We stand at the edge of pre-Christian, Christian and post-Christian contexts and long for His kingdom to come.’
A friend from Canada emails his blog as follows: The Celtic Grassroots of a Spirituality of Soul and Village: Reflections of the Writings of Ed Leidel and Ray Simpson
Many today seem to long for a spirituality of church that would be open to discover a community that would allow a Celtic experiment to take place. Such a possibility is described in former Episcopal Bishop Ed Leidel's Awakening Grassroots Spirituality. In this guide, he shares with us such a vision, and gives us tools with which to bring the vision into being. He helps us explore what it might mean to have a hearth - God's hearth - at the heart of a person, a parish, and a diocese. The Celtic author and former Guardian of the Community of Aidan and Hilda, Ray Simpson, from the UK, sites Leidel's work as another instance of the growing importance of grassroots Celtic spirituality, that is accessible to everyone, which for both authors is the primary importance of growing in God's Presence in community.
Leidel explores tools for Awakening this Nurturing of the Soul, such as: Embracing Tears for new beginnings; Creating a Healthy Community; Building an Integrated Lifestyle; Finding a Gateway to God that fits your Temperament; Discovering Your Well of Grace in the Eight Deserts; Journeying through the Three Great Conversions of Life; Developing Your Own Habits of the Heart; Visioning a "Village of Heaven"; and Awakening to Begin Again.
