THE CLARION
The Magazine Of The Parish Of St Mary The Boltons
May 2004
Pastoral Letter
from the Bishop of London
April 25th 2004
Beloved in Christ,
Earlier this year a remarkable discovery was made. Two small gold crosses were unearthed and the tomb of Saeberht, the first Christian King of the East Saxons was uncovered. The body has long since vanished but in life the king played a vital role in the events of 604 which we are celebrating this year.
We do not know when the last Romano-British Bishop of Londinium fled before the advancing pagan tide but thanks to the Venerable Bede we do know that St Mellitus and his fellow monks ascended Ludgate Hill in 604, to re-establish Christian worship on the site where St Paul’s Cathedral now stands. We celebrated the festival of St Mellitus yesterday. 1400 years ago, the intention was to re-found the Diocese of London to serve the East Saxon tribe whose king, Saeberht, was a recent convert to the Christian faith.
The London Church plant was not immediately successful and Saeberht’s sons turned the bishop out. Bede says that they were prepared to take the bread of the communion but unwilling to face the discipline of baptism. Within three generations, however, the Diocese had indigenous East Saxon leadership from St Erkenwald and his sister Ethelburga and the story of the church in London has been continuous from that day to this.
All this may interest those with a taste for history but we are not celebrating 1400 years of gossip from the muniment room. The Bible is a record of God’s conversation with Israel. As the story was rehearsed in the light of the experience of exodus and exile, it was understood afresh. In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ we see the story of God’s encounter with his people re-visited, re-interpreted and brought to a climax. The Christian faith is not merely a local edition of universal spiritual truisms, which can be distilled out of the Bible. Transforming revelation is ignited when we contemplate the story of Jesus and associate our story with his and see our community in his light.
In the night in which he was betrayed, Jesus entrusted his future in the world to his friends and promised the gift of the Holy Spirit to lead them into all the truth. That night and the ensuing action of God is the turning point of history. It has transformed our world. The life that has flowed from the empty tomb has given birth to hope and beauty but the subsequent history of the Church has also been disfigured by tragic perversions of the truth as we see it in Jesus.
As Christians we look back at the story of the Church in our own City with more than academic interest. How far has the Christian community fulfilled its promise to build a civilisation of love from which no one is excluded from the compassion of God? How has the Church sought to respond to changing circumstances and to sing the Lord’s song in many different centuries?
In the fresh beginning made in the 7th century when darkness was falling on much of the Christian world, the mission to the East Saxons involved styles of music, worship and living that were unfamiliar to the local tribe while communities of prayer for men and women were established to give depth to the spiritual life of the whole community. Now that London is no longer a tribal capital but a microcosm of the whole world whose citizens represent every conceivable language and cultural group, how are we organising our life as a Christian community so that together we can be in earnest an expression of God’s love in Jesus Christ for all our fellow citizens? I have seen inklings of a response in the chanting of Korean Anglicans, in lay groups exploring the link between spirituality and sustainable development, and in Cathedral Evensong.
This is a year for growing in awareness of how effectively we are representing Christ the Door, the fissure in the rock through which God’s future kingdom can flood into the world. I hope and pray that you will find time and inspiration this year to explore this question in the light of our church’s story and your own particular place in it.
There are fresh springs everywhere but in a world where lethal knowledge without spiritual wisdom has empowered extreme individuals and opened the door to the possibility of catastrophe, we are called to be lively members of a body capable of working together for the justice and peace which God intends for His world.
In the conversation between God and human beings what is the Eternal Word seeking to communicate now?
I look forward to praying with as many of you as possible in St Paul’s on May 22nd so that we can survey the way we have come these past 14 centuries and pray for the assistance of the Holy Spirit as we seek to be more faithful to God in Christ in the light of the challenges facing our generation.
With thanks for our partnership in the gospel,
RICHARD 132ND Bishop of London.
Good Friday
Notes on Gerald’s Three Hour Service Addresses
1 Body
I began by talking about the human body using Guido Rocha’s painting ‘The Tortured Christ’ (1975).
Christianity is more than a philosophy or a set of ideals. It is about incarnation – God emptying himself into the physical world. Open a newspaper or turn on the TV news and we see the Passion played out again and again as people are victimised and abused.
But it is not supposed to be like this. St. Irenaeus, a second century bishop, said that ‘the glory of God is a human being truly alive, and the end of human living is the glory of God’.
So where did it go wrong? Let’s think about our own bodies. Over the years we’ve done good things (played sports, borne children, offered strength, support and warmth) but we’ve also done some dumb things (become drunk, been over-reliant on pills, smoked, eaten too much – and perhaps worse). We have not always cared for this ‘temple of the Holy Spirit’ (1 Corinthians 6. 19). Even by so simple a thing as poor posture we may have damaged ourselves.
As the world’s population explodes so understanding our bodies, listening to them becomes crucial. ‘Fat is a political issue’. In a global economy with the rich constantly on the move and the poor abandoned and living in increasingly straightened circumstances we are evermore anonymous, unknown to each other and strangers to ourselves.
In this vacuum the capacity for bodies to interact illicitly grows apace. Chat rooms and mobile phones that paradoxically carry us into virtual worlds untrammelled by geography can lead us into dangerous liaisons. Deals that can disadvantage many people are sealed with a handshake.
The body in Rocha’s painting is shouting ‘I thirst’. Christ demands our attention. He calls us to consider what we do to ourselves, what we do we others, what nails we have driven home. This body screaming naked from his cross is a long way from Adam and Eve.
How has it been with our body? If we can answer this question honestly then we will become wise and this wisdom will inform our behaviour and be of benefit to others.
2 Soul
Jesus, the Jew, lived at a time when there was a culture war between different ways of understanding what it means to be human. To put it simply Semites place the emphasis on this world where people collectively are the site for divine activity whereas the Greeks concentrated on the immortal soul and its destiny in the next world. Christianity is an uneasy hybrid of these two.
For the purposes of this afternoon let’s regard the soul as shorthand for who we are truly, our identity. In Craigie Aitchison’s crucifixion scene he portrays a Christ with no arms, just a torso tied to a post, being viewed by a dog. It’s a Bedlington Terrier (a cross between otter-hound and whippet). According to Aitchison Bedlingtons have ‘the appearance of a lamb and the heart of a lion.’ They have the habit of running around and then standing and staring.
I think (including a dog) adds to the horror (of the crucifixion). The animals are meant to be upset, concerned. It’s as though the animal is walking along, looks up and is suddenly amazed and horrified.
The crucified without arms adds to the sense of the body’s impotence. The ochre colour of the background points us to another reality – the soul or as I now prefer to express it the ‘field’ which is capable of expansion and contraction. So where is the growth in our inner life?
The point of contact between the Jewish and Hellenistic traditions is ‘breath’. According to Genesis chapter 1 God breathed life into humanity. We are more than just the physical. Life is not manufactured but given. We are not surfing the zeitgeist but expressions of transcendent power.
If the relationship of the divine and the human is to be not only given but also received and realised then it must be contemplated. We must value silence and, like Aitchison’s dog, stop and attend. Jesus often went apart alone. He had a deep inner Galilee without which he could not have done what he did. His wisdom was as broad as the ocean.
3 Judgement
How did we learn obedience? There are some things we have to obey or we cause chaos. Think of the Highway Code.
Genesis claims that humanity fell into a wretched condition because Eve and Adam were disobedient. Israel suffered because it was disobedient. This is overturned in the new dispensation by Mary’s obedience and her Son’s willingness to go to the cross.
But teaching on obedience easily becomes stifling. We learn that many rules we obey are arbitrary. The cornerstone of our Highway Code (driving on the left) is suicide in continental Europe or America. In the arts and human discovery it’s the person who breaks the rules, goes out on a limb, takes a risk who often forges a new stage in human development.
Obedience can degenerate into ‘the hardening of the oughteries’. But the blood of Jesus flows free. Obedience is not free-standing. It must be undergirded with love. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Ps 111.10). To paraphrase: ‘the beginning of wisdom is to live in awesome awareness of God’. Augustine commenting on Ps 31 says paradoxically that all sin springs from love but it is love misdirected. In Jesus our love is set in order. As Thomas Traherne said ‘our wants are ligatures that bind us to God’.
In Salvador Dali’s ‘Christ of St. John’ heaven and earth are bound together by the descent of the perfect Jesus. Here is no judge handing down commandments but a son descending perfect in his body and will. So through Christ we judge ourselves in advance of the great Judgement. In Cardinal Newman’s poem Dream of Gerontius (famously set to music by Elgar) the soul having been judged cries ‘take me away’. This is a cry not of abject despair but the knowledge that redemption is fully achieved and now has to be finally worked out.
We are not to await judgement passively but to evaluate our lives constantly here and now in and through the wisdom of Christ.
4 Mindfulness
Heidegger characterised human existence as Sein zum Tode (‘being towards death’). But we easily forget death in a culture where life expectancy has increased, infant mortality has declined, where it has been medicalised and privatised and where funerals are done with minimum fuss.
Events, however, intervene such as 9/11. (The service sheet had a photograph of what was left of the Twin Towers.) Scripture, however, offers stringent realism (e.g. Luke 12. 17-31, 1 Timothy 6. 7). In a world that can be unfair we should always live as if this may be our last day. I quoted excerpts from Thich Nat Han’s book Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames (Riverhead Books, New York, 2001) and Dr Johnson’s famous comment: ‘If a man is told that he is to die in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully’.
Wisdom helps us to sift our priorities. We need to ask ourselves questions such as: Do we need more stuff? If today is our last, how would we have lived life differently? What’s stopping us?
5 Transformation
The history of Judaism shows a development of understanding on what lies beyond death. Our experience is that we outlive people we know and love. Life goes on. So does it go on for the person who has died?
The early Hebrews appeared not to have a strong sense of individual. The dead went to a place of wraith-like existence (She’ol) - not a place of hope but life all but evacuated of meaning. People lived on in their children.
But later there grew a sense that God has created every human life. Given that we all die there will be a sifting of the righteous and unrighteous, a Day of the Lord, a time of accountability, a final reckoning such as in Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37).
If knowing that we are going to die changes our priorities then knowing that we are to account for our words, thoughts, actions, how we used our bodies and resources as well as what we did not do and choices we did not make should lead us into a very different form of consciousness. (See the parable of the Prodigal Son Luke 15. 11ff.)
The death of Christ teaches us how to die and how to live. In the Gospels Christ’s death is not presented as a fact, a destiny passively endured, but rather as an act, the culminating event of a life. It is a death brought to life by love – God’s love for humanity, the divine passion of love that becomes a passion of love that becomes a passion of suffering in the Son’s death for love.’
(Enzo Bianchi)
For those of us who believe, the death of Jesus discloses that our deaths are not sad denouements at the end of our lives (lives that may have been disordered, selfish, sinful, full of twists and turns that have been good or bad in equal measure) but that we come to a place at the limits of physical existence where our spirit/soul/field is transformed. We can do no more for good or for ill but are transformed in God’s hands as he sees fit. We will be transformed in and by his wisdom.
6 Victory
One of the great miracles of Christianity is how an image of shame (the cross) became an image of victory. (The service sheet had a picture of a cross in an apse of a church Ravenna containing an early mosaic.) At the end Jesus cried ‘It is finished.’ But what is finished?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge identified the tension between those ways of seeing the world objectively (‘it is’) and those ways of experiencing the world from the starting point of ‘I am’.
John’s gospel is full of ‘I am’ sayings. Jesus pitches himself against the ideologies of his world (Herod and Caiaphas). Apparently Jesus loses.
But ‘it is’ is finished because the power of the gospel resides not in facts (as Mel Gibson’s latest film would suggest) but in the ‘I am’ (human identity) that demands attention, nourishment and respect.
Modern life is difficult because we are being turned into throughput. ‘All that is solid melts into air’, as Marx said. But something in us rebels against that. We have bodies, souls, wills, determination, desires, energies, expectations. We experience revelation in art, nature and relationships. Jews and Christians are followers of the ‘I am’ (see Exodus 3. 1-14 and the ‘I am sayings in John).
This sophisticated yet disarmingly simple man Jesus attracts us. No one worships Herod or Caiaphas but Jesus …
God makes us wise by showing us love. So we are carried beyond the images of horror that we have seen today, through the representation of Christ and his mother in the east window of St. Mary’s to the image on the front of the service sheet showing a wise and holy Christ fashioned by a twentieth century East African craftsman standing simply on his cross. Or as the 17C writer put it in a Christmas poem
There is no wisdom for the wise
Save love, the shepherds’ sacrifice
Wise men, all ways of knowledge past,
To the shepherds’ wisdom come at last.
Many of the ideas in these addresses are to be found in Being Human: A Christian understanding of personhood with reference to power, money, sex and time (Church of England Doctrine Commission Report 2003) and On a Friday Noon: Meditations Under The Cross by Hans-Ruedi Weber (SPCK London 1979)
Easter Day Sermon
So we come to the end of the great week of remembering. We have welcomed Christ to Jerusalem on his donkey and been with him through his last supper when he bid his followers to take bread and wine ‘in remembrance’ of him. We were with him through his arrest and trial. We saw him die. But unlike his earliest followers we know that on this day he rose from the dead. The tomb is empty and Christ is present.
But ‘remembering’ in our culture is so difficult. The longer we live the more subject we are to degenerative conditions that erode our memory. A priest was visiting an elderly parishioner with severe memory loss who had gone into a residential home. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked kindly. ‘No, dear’, came the reply, ‘but ask the nurse down the hall and she’ll tell you who you are’.
We have so much more to memorise – computers, credit cards and mobile phones have PIN numbers and passwords. When I was an undergraduate I had a poster on my wall which showed a large orang-utang sunning himself on the branch of a tree. Beside the ape were the words
The more I study, the more I know.
The more I know, the more I forget.
The more I forget, the less I know.
So why bother?
And then there is a spirit in our culture that would prefer us not to remember some things. There is little mention by our political leaders now of Saddam Hussein as our ally in the days when Iran, not Iraq, was seen as the enemy of the West. As President Kennedy said ‘the greatest enemy of the truth is not the lie but the myth’.
But there are those whose aim in life is to remember. God’s ancient people the Jews remember at this time the Passover – their liberation from slavery and the gift of a Promised Land. Many groups that see themselves as having an identity but are subject to oppression, take heart from this story. As Desmond Tutu is fond of saying ‘When European colonialists came to Africa and took our land they made the mistake of giving us the Bible’.
In today’s gospel (Luke 24. 1-12) the messengers who encounter the women who have brought spices to conclude the burial of Jesus tell them ‘to remember’.
Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, … Then they remembered Jesus’ words.
So if our remembrance this Easter Day is to be authentic we need to weave the story of the first Easter into our own continuing story of resurrection. Let’s take ourselves back to the time when we felt like we were dead. We were critically ill, our business had gone bust, a love affair had ended. We were entombed in misery.
But women came bearing spices. Our friends, often the most unexpected people, but those who are strong and unafraid of the stench of death, drew near. They did not care that we no longer looked our best, smelt terrible, had no money or had lost our reputations. They came in love and compassion.
Slowly, we came alive again. We went on – chastened and poorer but also wiser. We were the same but not the same. Our priorities were different. We knew things that we had not known before.
So it is with Christ and his resurrection. He was not the same as he was before his bloody crucifixion. He appears behind locked doors, on lake shores and is known in the breaking of bread. And each time he reminds his followers of what he is about – peace, forgiveness and life.
Christ is risen. We are risen. Alleluia! Amen.
Gerald Beauchamp
Gerald’s News
On Sunday 18 April I announced my intention to leave St. Mary’s in the autumn to test a vocation to the religious life with the Society of St John the Evangelist at the their monastery in Cambridge, Massachusetts (SSJE). My formal resignation depends on my satisfactorily completing US immigration requirements.
So why am I doing this? When I sensed a vocation to the priesthood in my teens I was encouraged by my then vicar to spend time in convents and monasteries in order to enter more fully into the life of prayer. So I have always valued the religious life and have long been attracted to it.
Having said that, I had not found a community until now that I wanted to join. Monasteries are strange places. Strong-minded individuals cooped up together can easily degenerate into a life that is damaging not creative. I also thought that poverty, chastity and obedience would limit not develop my potential.
At the beginning of my sabbatical last year I stayed at SSJE and renewed my sense of contemplative prayer. The spirit and the silence of the monastery chapel there is palpable. Having had a retreat, however, I still thought that the life was not for me.
On my return to the UK I was set fair to continue as Vicar here and carry on being Area Dean of Chelsea. But two things happened that changed my view. The first was the fall out from the Jeffrey John affair. As you know I think that the American church is right to recognise human diversity at every level.
Secondly, there was a parish weekend led jointly by a Roman Catholic nun and myself in September 2003. At the Eucharist on the Sunday we had extraordinary periods of silence. As I reflected on that I realised that what I am best at (which is not the same as saying that I am any good at it) is silence both in terms of silent prayer and the pastoral art of listening to what is not being said.
Jean Paul Satre claimed that human beings lead lives of quiet desperation. In my experience, many people do, and one of the purposes of the church is to enable people to find their voice and speak of what is locked within them.
When Jesus was tempted in the wilderness he was not being lead to do anything ‘wrong’. He wasn’t being tempted to steal or murder. But he was offered the choice between the good and the best. Or as Aristotle realised we have to decide between happiness and truth. I love being a parish priest but I sense a call within a call.
Next year I will be 50. I have always had a strong sense that life is very short. When I was about five years old a favourite great uncle died. It is for me a great mystery that we are here one minute and gone the next. So there is never a time to lose. Every moment is to be lived to the full. Choices especially the difficult ones must be embraced. God must be heard and for me that can only be done if I can enter ever more deeply into silence.
As a parish priest I have had my successes and my failures. It has been a great privilege to be vicar of St. Mary’s. Standing in the pulpit last Sunday on Easter Day in this restored building full of worshippers with glorious music echoing around I found it hard to believe that I am being called away. But ‘the hound of heaven’ is snapping at my heels.
I have come to realise that if I am to develop the gift of silence I need to do it in the context of the religious life. Silence, too, has become the key to poverty, chastity and obedience. No longer are they hurdles to be overcome but the potential fruits of contemplation. And if I am to embrace such a life I believe that it needs to be in the monastery in America where I fell in love with God again in a new way last year.
Initially, I thought that I would be unable to pursue this path. SSJE’s literature says that it takes men only between the ages of 25 and 45. But I knew that I would have no peace unless I contacted the Novice Guardian. Initially we corresponded via email and I have visited the monastery twice – after Christmas and again last month. On the second occasion I had formal interviews with the members of the Society and also a psychologist who appears to think that I am not mad.
So I will be going to start a new life on another continent. Please pray for me as I pray for you. Pray, too, for the churchwardens, members of the Parochial Church Council and the bishop as decisions are made about the future of this parish. The message of Easter is that in God’s hands things – individuals, communities, places – are never just broken, they are always broken open. May that be true for St. Mary’s as well as for me.
It will be a long time before we say ‘good-bye’ properly but thank you for being a wonderful community.
For more information about SSJE see www.ssje.org.
Aïda Gowan RIP
From the address given at her funeral on Friday 2 April
I feel it a privilege for me to speak here about Aïda. But a privilege in front of you her Church, because the Church was her family. Many of you would wish to lay claim to a part of her and she certainly would think it marvellous to feel she belonged to each and everyone of you. There was never exclusion.
Her life was extraordinary; to me she was extraordinary. The telling of stories from her life would so often dominate her gatherings which for her regular companions, such as my mother, would often prompt an expectant sigh. Aïda was always centre stage but I must confess to have loved hearing about her life, irrespective of repetition. It is a major regret to me not to have written it down - as oft I said I would. In many ways the tales were her children; a relative sorrow for not having had children was a major regret and she hated the loneliness of living alone in the end.
Her English mother, a schoolteacher, met Aïda’s father playing tennis in provincial East Anglia. Here was a man from foreign lands studying there the horticulture of agriculture. In those days, you would learn about foreigners; yes, but not marry them! He obviously swept her mother away.
You can imagine the effect that their marriage had upon not only her mother’s family but also that of her father’s, back home. And home it was that he returned. Back across the world to complete his study and establish his career, leaving her mother to bring Aïda up alone. I had joked with Aïda that her father had come to England to study seeds, not to sow them, and she chuckled in her “ce n’est pas comme il faut” way. Her father became a figure of awe and this was reflected throughout her life for she adored men. She would do anything to encourage them, support them, stand by them. At a tender age she travelled into Europe. In a way, upon a quest to find her father. She met him for the first time at the age of seven.
As a child she would tell the poignant story of how when in Rome still very young, unable to speak a word of Italian, she didn’t know how to say she wanted to go to the lavatory…. She could not communicate nor understand the nuns at her convent school.
The travel, that started early for her, was to become an intrinsic part of her life. She twice caught pneumonia as a child and in search of warmer climes they finally settled as a family united, in Cairo.
Her father, in an effort to try and maintain as much all aspects English, would have them hold ‘tea time’ and even reared their own turkey for one Christmas. Malhereusement the fowl became the pet and neither mother nor daughter could find the heart to devour it, come the moment.
In her search for a dog, in Egypt, it was the poorly, runt of a litter that she chose and championed; saving it from almost certain expedient despatch. She took that dog home and nourished it, and loved-it-better and soon transformed it into a specimen example. That epitomised her feeling for and towards the underdog. The underdog always stole her heart; something that was kindled in a reflection of her own life as a child perhaps; not one of hardship but one in which she learnt early how to get by on her own. Very formative times.
Her stretched nationality she filled with languages. Cairo was the most international Metropolis. In her formative childhood she added French, Italian and Arabic to her mother tongue. But in reality she was in many ways a deception. We know her as typically English; not so surprising with a schoolteacher mother; yet I saw her as a “Grande Dame” and above all she was an International.
Because of her languages, her early confidence, and not least because of her stunning looks, she found herself an enviable position in Cairo as personal secretary to the British Treasury Representative, Leonard Waight. She was delighted that he asked her to accompany him to his next international posting. It perhaps came not as a complete surprise that he later asked her to marry him to which she agreed. This catapulted Aïda into a far wider world. Together they travelled and lived in Burma, Washington, Cairo and New Dehli… attached to the High Commission. Leonard was asked to assist the Maldive Islands when they changed their shells into currency. Aïda was asked to dance with King Farouk.
In the course of their travels they met and became close friends to a certain Anthony Gowan. And it is this treasure to her life that I always think is the most wonderful. Leonard was a good deal older than Aïda and it was not along time before Anthony had discreetly confessed his love to her. Aïda, forever “comme il faut”, had said, “But I am a married lady.” Anthony settled for respecting her position but told her that he would wait. And wait he did… for twelve years… what a long engagement.
Leonard in his later years, realising that he would be leaving Aïda perhaps not too well provided for, expressed to her that should she feel the need to find herself a further future husband, she could not go far wrong in a man like Tony Gowan. I had the luck to have met him. A handshake that left you in no doubt. The assurance of trust and conviviality.
And marry they did after Leonard died. For neither was it a disappointment and it was in Tony that she found true love. They enjoyed a wonderful life together and later, through his long and difficult illness, she cared for him to the end.
At an embassy reception my mother’s American friend Edward, introduced himself to the couple with the opening line to Aïda, “ Say, are you Lauren Bacall?” She was a stunning lady…. and Anthony Gowan went on to be Edward’s best man in the marriage to my mother.
Upon her final return to England after her globe trotting life, The English speaking Union won a valuable asset. She for years taught British conversation to international envoys and their wives and yet in her last few months the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital heard her speak more Arabic than English and when she moved on to the Kensington nursing home, the night staff thought that she could not understand them; they were astonished when I told them she was English. They thought she was French.
The dichotomy of her national and genetic extracts is what I perhaps love of her most, for I too had an English mother and a “foreign” father and know how much that pushes and pulls you, as much as it expands.
I found it hard to just pop in and see Aida. There was no such thing as a quick “hello and how are you”. She would not allow it and you felt that you would disappoint her more perhaps, if you only spent a short while in her presence.
She was a sensual person. We would enjoy talking of visual encounters, of bodies that you would pass in the street. She would confess to enjoying the simple pleasure of watching a man just walking down the road; the wonderful and varied forms of humanity that pass everyday before ones eyes.
She was a generous person, she gave readily.
She told me she never cried and I certainly never saw her. It was not that she was hard. There beneath that calm exterior was a very warm-hearted person. She had more passion in the tips of her fingers than many people had in their lives. Under the calm proper façade that reflected her Englishness was a heart that could beat for the world.
At the nursing home in Kensington, I was talking to her with one of her carers. I was telling her how kind I thought the carer was. Aïda in one of her rare but very clear comments said “Of course she is, she’s African!”
I will miss you.
Julian Dakowski
Thank You
… to everyone who made Easter so special this year – Boo Simpson and the flower arrangers, Audrey and the garden group, Nicholas Ansdell-Evans and the musicians and the donation of Traidcraft chocolate eggs that were shared on Easter Day.
Silver and the Church
An Exhibition of Treasures
from London Churches
Tuesday 13 April – Saturday 15 May
at Goldsmith’s Hall, Foster Lane EC2
Free Entry For All
On Thursday 13 May there will also be a reception hosted by St. James’s Piccadilly for their £2.3 restoration appeal. Tickets £12. Apply to St. James’s Piccadilly Fundraising, 197 Piccadilly, London W1J 9LL. Also see www.st-james-piccadilly.org.
Public Lecture
at St. Paul’s Cathedral
on Wednesday 26 May, 5.30pm
The Bishop of London will speak on ‘Tribal Diocese to World City Church: the Spiritual Ambitions of the 21st Century Church’. All welcome.
St Teresa’s Eucharist
The monthly Eucharist at St Teresa’s is being suspended because there are now only four Anglicans in the nursing home. They are all in poor physical and mental health and unable to cope with the service. Gerald and others will continue to visit and take the sacrament to the residents as and when required.
Summer Fair, Saturday 26 June
The PCC has decided that the proceeds this year should be given to the (Church of England) Children’s Society.