CF Post 30
Abbot Erik wanted to address the reasons behind a Christian community. The community we form in the church – ecclesia – “coming together”- is a redemptive process and experience.
The Community Fellowship Weekend
Including Notes from Abbot Erik’s Talk on Community
Abbot Erik wanted to address the reasons behind a Christian community. We were in mid-Lent, bringing thoughts of the Exodus narrative and the forming of the people. The individuals who came out of Egypt – the 12 tribes and others, a bit of a rabble! – turned into a nation of people through the experience of the time in the wilderness. He spoke of the redemptive dimension, how something was healed. The community we form in the church – ecclesia – “coming together”- is a redemptive process and experience. Atomised, individualised people were “redeemed” in a social group held together by God’s forgiveness, mercy, promise, covenant.
The retreat was based around readings from “A Song Among The Stones” by Kenneth Steven.
We were led in an imaginative meditation on Matthew 14
Holland House Silent Retreat Beyond These Shores – Reflections
“The retreat was based around readings from “A Song Among The Stones” by Kenneth Steven. In a sequence of poems he writes he has “sought to give the sense of the fragments of some lost manuscript—-nothing more than the last worn away stones of the story”. The following extracts give, I hope, a “flavour” of the poem.”
This northernness novembered in a moment
Driven slate-gray in a suddenness of storm
And sometimes, just sometimes,
The glory of God in the morning
All I know is I must seek
This somewhere with all my soul
And the moon rose over the rim of the earth
And fell like fish upon the sea
Their moon road north
Islands of sea, floors of sea
Valleys of sea, hills of sea
Lifts of sea, slopes of sea
Hollows of sea, steeps of sea
Shapes of sea, shapes of sea.
Jane Johnston
Feedback from Fresh Expressions On The Road Event by Ali Dorey
On the Road was one of the now annual
Anglican (Church of England) day events that
gather people from parishes across the UK who
are interested in growing “fresh expressions of
church”. For those who are unsure what that
phrase means, basically it is referring to things
like Contemplative Fire – communities that are
exploring following Jesus (or “Followers of the
Way” as people in the early church often
identified themselves, and as we may do, too),
but not within the church as we knew it…
Light Shines in the darkness
Advent shadows to the end the waning of daylight and nature’s slumber, while alerting us to the great light of new beginnings… And we have indeed walked through darkness in a world grown meaner, not least in the land where a promise of peace on earth was sealed by the birth in a stable of a Saviour: Immanuel, God with us…