Wisdom Justice and Love

Treasures of the Tudor Age Concert

‘Treasure of the Tudor Age’ A concert featuring the music of Byrd and Sheppard

Saturday 12th May at 7.30pm

St Martins Church

Albany Road

Cardiff

Free Entry

Donations welcome for the the charitable work of the Order of Lazarus

Money

Benefit Fraud £1 billion

Tax Evasion £50 Billion

Tax Avoidance £75 Billion

Living in Easter Saturday

Put this post on my blog, so I thought I’d share it with you guys too: Maundy Thursday & Good Friday

community

This week I’ve been having some difficulties, and have therefore been appreciating some forms of community available with dispersed friends & family. Ones that happen fairly often are phone calls, texts and emails, but this week I’ve had two letters, both arriving at just the time I felt I needed them! I’ve been rediscovering the joy of communicating this way, and there’s something lovely and personal and tangible about receiving a letter. The first came from a friend with lots of lovely news and encouraging cards enclosed, and the second from friends very far away: Sarah&Dom. I remember picking a date for them to write, but I can’t honestly recall the reason for that date in particular (they’d suggested they’d write on birthdays and such). Somehow or other (naturally, I suspect God’s weaving in this) I received it today, and it has helped sweeten some less welcome news and put it in perspective. I also had that lovely experience on the phone last night to my sister, where you reconnect with someone that you haven’t talked properly with for a long time. I kept finding myself thinking, who’s this wise woman I’m speaking with, where did she learn that? It was good to learn from her own “windy path.” And I have a pubchurch lunch with all the kids to look forward to tomorrow. Many, many reminders to me of a saying I first heard in Malawi: God is good, all the time, nthawi zonse, mulungu wabwino, even if (as I learned from my dictionary, trying to spell these correctly) masiku sakoma onse, not all days are Sundays.

iRated and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

For once, it was an all girls huddle at the Flora and we enjoyed having a good catchup & chat about life & this & that. Well done to K&S& kids for taking part in the sport relief run! We did also have a few specific things we “iRated”. R and I had seen Spiro at their live gig in Pontypridd, so we had a little sample of their music and chatted about the different ways that we had heard the music. Although I think the CD is good, there was something mystical for me about seeing them live; perhaps it was the combination of the discovery of a new band and venue (to me), especially in a dry spell for gigs, with music that transported my imagination. For R it was also reminiscent of scandinavian crime series’ soundtracks (feel free to edit & comment!), and I discovered a whole new realm beyond Agatha Christie, Morse & Dirk Gently. We also chatted about upcoming greenbelt lineup, and I discovered Nitin Sawhney (apparently belatedly), who I am now excited about seeing (alongside Tom Wright, Shane Claiborne, Giles Fraser, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, Seth Lakeman & Padraig O’Tuama).

R brought along a couple of books to discuss (P Take Note!): What the New Age is STILL Saying to the Church and Post-Christendom. I’ll leave it to her to discuss those more, but the conversation moved from them to (more) discussions about community and what that means, particularly in a much more mobile age, and for ourselves as a group that (try to) care for one another & those outside our immediate social circle. There were two news pages I had found that seemed relvant to these ideas: one about a very British Traditional view of  churches & cathedral buildings, and another about some research on living arrangements (amongst other factors) and depression. We chatted about social networking and blogs as a way to bridge physical distance, but ended with this amusing clip about, “how odd [your] online life is”.

Videodrome

A cross section of our recent viewing pleasures:

iStudent

Siri Spoof

Video: Corner – success, generosity & gratitude

Lent – something beautiful to listen to – Kyrie Eleison

Open Book Discussion: Healing

We kicked our open book night (bible discussion in the pub) off with reading Mark chapter 1 verses 29-34 and then looking through this sermon by Nadia Bolz-Weber about it.

We first chatted about our immediate responses to reading it… wandered around discussions on the concepts of evil spirits, our experiences, or lack therof, Cultural constructs, Evil in oppressive structures in society, equality/not, our lives, bible interpretation, growing to know God better, love, sacrifice, submission, service, Greenbelt festival and somewhere along the line, the text & the sermon

The highlight for me the idea that we are all, to pinch a phrase, broken healers (like the nameless mother-in-law here), and in recognising that we can dispense God’s grace to one another. Perhaps sometime we can try doing their ‘open space’ plan:

“during Open Space, a 10 minute time after the sermon where we reflect and respond to the Gospel, we had a couple healing prayer stations set up where people were prayed over and their hands blessed and anointed with oil.  Then they changed placed and did the same for the next person”

Sacred Music

I was looking for a song, “what wondrous love is this, O my soul,” because it was the song of the day for Common Prayer

I came across this version, and I love the harmonies: