Lent 5: Pew Sheet and Order of Service

Dear Nicholas

Here are links for Lent 5 to our :

Several people let us know that they have had trouble opening these file links, so we are trying a new option this week, BestFile, which is a free file-sharing platform. Please let us know if you have trouble opening any of the links.

Last Thursday we said farewell Sally Porter at our Requiem Mass. It was a beautiful and moving service, and a special thanks to all who contributed. If you would like to watch a recording from the live-stream, that can be found here. Sally's remains will be interred in our Memorial Garden in the coming weeks at a private ceremony.

Our produce sale was a great success last Sunday and we have more to sell, so it will be on again this Sunday after the service. Please come along to buy jams, chutneys, biscuits and plants. All proceeds go to Anglican Board of Mission's "Coming to the Light" project, which we support.

We are hosting another concert this year by the talented Agnes Weinstein, and the details are below. I encourage you to support this concert -- tickets are only $15.

We are also in conversation with another local music group about hosting their concerts. This is an area of our engagement with the local community that I am keen to develop, so if you know of groups who would like to use our church for a musical concert, please let me know. The church has wonderful acoustics and it is an excellent location for concert goers.

We are doing our final preparations for Holy Week services and there are a range of services you can join us for.

A particular highlight for me each year is Maundy Thursday 28 March, 7:30pm, where we have foot and hand washing, and "the stripping of the altar", where we remove everything from the sanctuary. It is a very moving and deeply reflective service, and I encourage you to attend, even if you don't attend regularly.

Like all our services, it doesn't matter if you have never been to church before - all are welcome. Our community includes people with a huge variety of views and perspectives on all things religious: atheists and agnostics and doubters and mystics and questioners and so forth.

Church in my view is not a location where people of the same beliefs gather, but rather a hospitable place where each can take the opportunity to reflect, to be silent, to take stock, to be refreshed, to ponder the big questions of life, to enjoy conversation.

I look forward to our journey together as we approach the concluding weeks of Lent.

Kind regards

Matthew

Here's another poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer:

The Day You Took My Picture Was the Day

March 9, 2024 by Rosemerry

I sat by the pond and watched
the blue dragonflies land
on slender green reeds.
And the sun was warm and
the air was still as I was still,
which is to say the air pulsed
with aliveness and so did I.
If someone could see the picture
from that day, they might think
I was sad. No slip of a smile
touches my lips. My glance
is far off, unfocused.
But I was in a place beyond
happiness, a place of being with,
a place that asks nothing of me
except that I forget everything
but sitting beside the pond
and marveling at blue dragonflies
as they weave and land,
the reeds so slender, so green.