The Priory Church of St Mary and the Holy Cross is open daily between 10am and 4.00pm for individual prayer and contemplation.

The Priory Church of St Mary and the Holy Cross is open for worship  as listed under Services.

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ZOOM SERVICES

Zoom Services on Sundays will continue on a monthly basis  – the first Sunday of the month at 5pm.

To participate please telephone Ian Newton on 01328 830947 or email iannewton46@ gmail.com. You will be warmly welcomed.

 

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Revd Ian Whittle’s  LETTER

Dear Friends and Parishioners,

I nearly always find that I meet with God much more out of doors than within.  But I always learn more about God inside: at church, at home, through a book.  But I once met with God outside, but through writing which was inscribed upon a very permanent home – the tomb of a man, or a woman whose name I do not know, which faced St. Giles Street in Oxford.  Written, carved I suppose, so that every passer-by could see the words from Colossians Chapter 3, “Christ is all”.  It is a momentous statement; and its meaning will keep us amazed through years of endless bliss.  But its working out has been the purpose of Paul’s letter to the Christians at Colossae and is also our purpose as we live our lives.

‘We have gazed’, as a 19^th century commentator put it, ‘upon the majesty of his person, on the mysterious glory of his headship – alike over nature and over the church, on his redeeming blood, on his life-giving life, on his enthroned rest above, on his promised return.’

I could not put this better myself, so I will give you the rest of this prose hymn of praise.  ‘We have seen in him the inmost “Secret of God”, disclosed for us.  We have had a glimpse of the pure eternal gold of the “treasures of wisdom and knowledge” heaped and stored in him.

We have seen him as the basis of the Christian’s standing; he has blotted out the handwriting that was against us, nailing it to his cross; he has embodied us into himself.  He is at once both the power and the law of the Christian life; he is the peace of the Christian heart; he is the lamp and hearth of the Christian home.  It is he who binds souls together, or rather as it were fuses them into one, till people as distant as possible in race and associations know and love each other as more than brothers.  He is all things and in all.  That was Handley Moule of Durham.

He was always very kind to the young and encouraged the clergy by persistent hospitality and warmth.  His old house, Auckland Castle, has been thrown open and revived by the splendid Jonathan Ruffer.  A must stop in the North East.

This Easter let us celebrate Christ Risen, and Revival and Openness.  May we make every day special!

Yours truly,

Ian Whittle.

 

In Canterbury Cathedral

On a day sweet with April showers  the safe tyres of our tour bus had sung us south from London,

Sightseer pilgrims, cameras slung, no need or time on patient plodding horses for long diverting tales.

We stood at last at Beckett’s shrine lost in architecture and dates, confused by Norman and Gothic.

Our ancient tiny guide seemed shrunk into his suit, dwarfed by his clothes as we were all dwarfed by time.

His small precise English voice went on: pronounced ‘Our Lord,’ and the words fell on us like a benediction.

‘Our’ – incredible assumption of union offered in passing to American strangers, mortar for diverse motley stones.

Time and blood and history redeemed from meaninglessness: two words turned sightseers into pilgrims.

E.W. Oldenburg   20^th century