Category Archives: the cross

Still bearing the wounds of the cross

Christ, still bearing the wounds of the cross,
How long will ours last?
We want grief over and done with,
Our injuries healed and pain taken away.

Christ, still bearing the wounds of the cross,
In this stillness, wait with us,
As the women waited at the cross.

Christ, still bearing the wounds of the cross,
As we recognise in each other our shared wounds,
Help us to bear them together, holding fast to the light.

Christ, still bearing the wounds of the cross,
That were so life changing for us all,
Be with those who bear unfathomable changes, give them life.

Christ, still bearing the wounds of the cross,
May we your cross-wise ones, following in your way,
live your wounded life together in love, and may your kindom come
On earth as in heaven.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

A prayer for Ascension

Through the wood

My suggestion that we take a clergy selfie before the Good Friday service was only partly in jest. We certainly are a team even after this short time and it is quite an experience to be guided and supported by Father Ian and Father Aloysius.
Understanding my concern at not having taken part in such a service before they kindly and gently walked me through it before we started. After what we’d call a vestry prayer with the servers we began.
There’s a lot of movement in the service, much more than in your average one of the sort I’m used to.
We began face down on the floor. It was for me to determine how long this lasted and then get up, which was the challenging bit.
During the reading of the Passion Narrative I read the part of Jesus. There were some bits to add to my remembered Bible, like the first time Jesus was struck on the face and asked the one that had struck him to point out to him how he, Jesus, had caused offence.
The other part that moved me whilst I was reading it aloud, was when Jesus said ‘woman, here is your son’.
I said a few words about remembering the Passion at school, recalling particularly the Good Enough Friday which was an earlier blog post.
Then we brought the cross in. It was the one the young people had carried here from south Wales. Two of the young people held it upright in the middle of the hall as each person came forward to venerate or acknowledge it in some way, most with kiss, some with a touch of hand or head, all prayerfully, even the very youngest. It was during this part that I thought about ‘through the wood you call us’ and even ‘I’d like to make the world a sign/a manger or a cross/ from birth to death the way life goes/for gain or even loss’ (the song I wrote for this term).
At the end of the service the cross was left standing alone as we quietly left the hall.

Who is this?

We are surprised by a donkey.
Our stereotyped view of donkeys has them gentle and readily overlooked
But there are many kinds of donkeys:
Slow seaside plodders in kiss me quick hats,
Old thin burros their bones sticking out showing their years of toil and abuse,
Warm nosed nuzzley donkeys in comfortable family farm parks,
The silly ass of popular cartoons,
Each one bearing the cross sign burned into the fur on its back.
The audacious one comes, donkey riding,
Challenging our stereotypes,
As he takes the cross wise way.

There was nothing luke warm about the response of those Palm wavers,
The day had taken a different turn
Everyone was excited.
These days a guy on a donkey is not likely to raise much comment.
The audacious one still comes,
Challenging our stereotypes, winding along the Cross Street,
Will we bear the cross-wise call, burned onto our lives

A few days later, broken trees, discarded branches,
were all that remained to remind them he had taken that route.
The donkey was back in its stall or on with its normal daily grind.
Everything back to normal or was it?

Look for the Holy,
Call out Hosanna,
See the blessed one,
The audacious one,
Coming to claim us.

Good Enough Friday

What sort of Friday did you have?
I wonder if we are becoming obsessed with days of the week, especially ones we have chosen to designate as something particular. Feel good Friday is one of these. It refers to that historical thing the weekend which used to occur at the end of the working week. After working five days we’d get a weekend off, preceeded by, of course, Feel Good Friday.
But in these days of the gig economy and so many other euphemisms for dodgy work practices, many people don’t get a weekend off and there’s nothing feel good about Friday.
We’re now at the end of week 11 of our Spring term and this year we will break up for Easter holidays at the end of next week. So we’re in the market for that well known Spring argument, who decides when its Easter?
Not me. This year we miss out on being at school during Holy Week, so we have to do Holy Week early if we’re going to have it at all.
As a result, this week we’ve celebrated both Palm Wednesday and Palm Friday with two palm processions, one for Preschool and one for years 1 and 2.
During the Palm Friday procession, the ultimate piece of remembered Bible for the term, the last word in Feel Good Friday, came from our young cross carrier. Trying hard to keep the processional cross upright in the wind, he said: ‘This cross is making my arms hurt’. That really made today Good Enough Friday.