Dear Friends,
Today with the whole Church we celebrate Mary, Mother of the Lord. She is the first to respond to the coming of Jesus Christ, and so can be said to be the first ‘Christian’. As she becomes the mother of Jesus Christ, so she becomes the mother of the Body of Christ which is the Church. Her destiny is that of every faithful Christian, being taken with the risen Christ into the unending glory and praise of God. We celebrate all this in the Mass and with the procession of our Lady of Walsingham.
Appropriately we celebrate the same goodness and promise of God as we baptise Gareth Justin Sheard, son of Chris and Emma, and grandson of Malcolm and Marjorie Griffiths. We welcome their families and friends back to S. Michael’s today.
Here are some words from the Archbishop of Canterbury about the place of Mary in the Church:
When Mary conceives and so gives room to God, God gives room to her: her humanity blossoms into its fullest glory. For centuries, Christians have kept coming back to the idea that what happens in Mary is what has to happen to some degree in each of us. She, uniquely and once for all, says a “yes” so complete that her entire material life is changed by the coming of God to her.
And we are called to the same task, to give God room so that we may be changed, so that the eternal Word will live in us and speak and act in love to others. Only so are we ‘magnified’ like Mary, given our full dignity and splendour.
I hope you will all make the effort to come and join in the S. Michael’s Midwinter Mingle on Saturday evening. A lot of work is being put into this party, and I am sure we shall all enjoy it very much.
May God bless you all.
Fr Peter Williams
After a Pilgrimage to Walsingham:
From its origins in 1061 until the Reformation, Walsingham has been a major European pilgrimage destination—easily outranking Canterbury and attracting pilgrims from all over Christendom. Anglicanism is a practice of great and true beauty and moderation and intelligence and good taste; the national pilgrimage is none of these things. It is a jamboree for people who do not necessarily care much for dignity and good order, but do believe, often quite inarticulately, that joy is pleasing to the Lord.
Oddly enough many of the people most critical of Walsingham are the very same people who like to complain that Christianity is dualistic, anti-body, anti-pleasure and legalistically restrictive. The national pilgrimage celebrates the Incarnation—God made not simply “flesh” but a drinking, laughing, food-loving, friendship-seeking, party-going human being. It celebrates a child who went on pilgrimage himself and, to the justifiable irritation of his parents, got lost and found again. The national pilgrimage refreshes the religious parts that other Anglican practices do not reach. I think they are parts that we need to refresh. (Sara Maitland, The Guardian 5 June 2010)
