‘O be joyful in the lord all the earth; serve the lord with gladness and come before his presence with a song’ Psalm 100
value added or mystery
I shall aim to bring 2 things together here for our reflections this week.
The first – a tremendous celebration of life (very fitting for Easter) and the life of St Catherine’s which was the flip side of the time commitment and the sheer hard work of laying on an event such as the Open Doors with Books and Tea Rooms … I and others have enjoyed the stories and pics that have been bouncing all weekend. For me the greatest joy was the pleasure people derived from this event – people who have nothing to do with our church (or quite possibly any church), the pleasure of helping, of meeting and making new friends, of inviting to the scratch choir to sing at our Katholikentag Evensong later this month, to join a Book Club, to bake for the other Jubilee Event coming up in June….. so here is the value added. You think you are fund-raising, and funds were raised, but it was also social, spiritual, creative, confidence, emotional, intellectual (!)…..
The second – is under the banner of DiscussionForum (which exists to facilitate spontaneous gathered discussions as they crop up) The one currently on my desk to ‘facilitate and resource’ is around the mystery of what actually happens at Communion.
Is mystery a word which encompasses everything I don’t understand ?
Is mystery a word which labels the things we are not meant to understand ?
I know where I pitch on this one but what about you ?
Now in the space that has become in common parlance for ‘Kara has a weird brain’ I shall invite you to hold those two paragraphs together and see them as aspects of the same thing –
Can you see it too ? Yes ? No ?
I saw mystery (in both senses I gave above) at work / at play on Saturday and I experience value added at the Eucharist on a Sunday. The interplay has enriched my prayers – prayers of thanksgiving for those joys and gifts and blessings, and also prayers for such future events and my expectations of them.
