Dear Friends and Parishioners,

May I wish you a warm, happy, growth-filled August and September.  I, though, think that potatoes may be very small. A nice dusting of rain in the night would suit my beans and greens well!

We do live in unstable times: folly, war, wickedness and want seem to stalk a lovely world; and all those things speak of having got things wrong.

Stability is an antidote to error, as Paul encouraged the Colossians: “As therefore you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so live in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” (Colossians 2:6,7).  Form and pattern in creation are God’s means of approaching us; and so also are man-made forms and patterns, in music, words, buildings, books and people.  God is surely able to use those forms of service made for public worship: whether those forms are ancient and rigid, or modern and flexible.  If the Spirit may inspire the extempore, He may not be limited not to inspire that which is written, read and heard.  Indeed if liturgical forms are condemned, then this distaste for what is made may be the beginning of those anti-materialist errors against which Paul fulminated.

We are of the earth but with souls, which are of the heavens.  In Christ both meet.  In the exercise of making, doing, growing, caring, we are re-made, put back together, mended.  We can do a lot on our own, but add worship to the dish and we have a Feast.

Yours truly,

Ian Whittle.

Some lines of Coleridge:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

……All seasons shall be sweet to thee…..