The Priory Church, St. Bees

St. Bees Parochial Church Council

Minutes of the meeting held on Monday 3^rd March 2008 at 7.30pm in New College Hall.

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St. Bees Parochial Church Council

 Minutes of the meeting held on Monday 4^th February 2008 at 7.30pm in New College Hall.

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This last Sunday saw the typical mayhem of Mothering Sunday.   It was a good service and we enjoyed having our community orchestra with us.  David and Jim took the service but there was full involvement from the Sunday School kids as well as the Brownies.  Here are some of the mothers in our congregation receiving posies from their children.  Thanks to everyone who participated, especially the orchestra and everyone involved in making the posies.

In a previous parish I was bringing communion to a seniors’ care home that had in it many people in the later stages of Alzheimer’s or old age dementia.  It was a regular reminder that in some situations it doesn’t matter how good and enthusiastic of a communicator you are, sometimes you simply won’t be able to get through to people.  In this care home I went through the communion service and made a particular effort to speak to those who seemed to be awake and listening.  When it came to giving everyone the bread and the wine I received help from an unexpected source.  In this particular parish (I wasn’t priest-in-charge) we had communion wine that was extraordinarily bad.  It tasted a bit like what I imagined cooking sherry to taste like.  As I brought the wine to the elderly people gathered, two of them who had been unresponsive lurched forward and grimaced as they tasted it.  It was the only response I had had from them the entire time.  Of course I used this to further illustrate why we needed to get a different brand of communion wine.  But this instance was also a lesson that sometimes it takes something tough in order to wake us up.  Super strong coffee and loud alarm clocks are a couple of other examples that spring to mind.

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And God held in his hand

A small globe. Look, he said. 

The son looked. Far off, 

As through water, he saw 

A scorched land of fierce 

Colour. The light burned 

There; crusted buildings 

Cast their shadows; a bright 

Serpent, a river 

Uncoiled itself, radiant With slime.

On a bare Hill a bare tree saddened 

The sky. Many people 

Held out their thin arms 

To it, as though waiting 

For a vanished April 

To return to its crossed 

Boughs. The Son watched 

Them. Let me go there, he said.

~R.S. Thomas (1972)

h/t Diocese of Saskatchewan