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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
Hopes and dreams for CF….
How the original vision for CF might inform our future
Philip Roderick’s reflections at Contemplative Fire’s
Community Fellowship Weekend 7-9 March 2018, Mount St Bernard Abbey
Each one of us is different; our life experience and core stories vary hugely. In our bodies, minds and spirits, each one of us carries memories and meaning, wounds and well-being, penitence and possibility. Contemplative Fire rejoices in the variety of ways there are of hearing, seeing and awakening to the intricacy and pattern of the spiritual path.
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