The Priory Church of St Mary and the Holy Cross is open daily between 10am and 4.00pm for individual prayer in line with social distancing and hand hygiene guidelines.
The Priory Church of St Mary and the Holy Cross is open for worship as listed under Services.
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 Neighbours,
I 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, at a talk, 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 19th 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.’
As in the nineteenth century, so now. As in Colossae, in the first century, so now. We, and all our brothers and sisters who have gone before – are in Christ – so then, how do I live.
This is how we shall live, charting the depths of Christ’s love, scaling the heights of Christ’s delight in a people he has chosen to devote themselves to prayer and to be wise in every way – that we might commend that self same love and delight to people who need it very much. And all this becomes real when we ask him to work in us; when we say that “Christ is all”, and allow him to make it true for us.
Yours truly,
Ian Whittle
The Butterfly
My hands are warm to the butterfly
I am trying to set free.
Delicate, frail creature of beauty,
what can it know of me?
I am outside its comprehension.
It knows sunshine and showers,
darkness and the feel of flowers.
We do not ask it to do the impossible
and know Man.
So we, with God,
who looks with tenderness upon our frailty,
trying to guide us.
Trust him!
He knows the way, and, if we let him,
will open windows,
and, cradling us gently in hands we cannot comprehend
will lift us up and set us free.
Margaret Orford 20th century