"What good is it to me If Mary gave birth To the Son of God, And I do not also give birth to him In my time and culture?" Meister Eckhart (1260-1327)
Feeling Wise and Manly?
We met up for our SMALL sunday 10 Jan at Florence Park bandstand for a short worship followed by play in the park. Epiphany was this week and we remembered the three wise men/kings who followed a star and brought symbolic, if odd, gifts to the baby Jesus. There was some 'gold'; we burnt frankincense incense and followed Ariane who ran around the park holding a star on a pole!
And we thought: these people brought gifts because they wanted to express that what looked normal was anything but. And here we are today, normal folk meeting in a normal park on a normal sunday, but we do it because we want to say there's something not normal, special, about our meeting. We meet because we believe God is here.
Pints and Prattle
A pub trip turned into our Guardians' meeting, who thought about the community, said some pub style prayers (saying words from a liturgy but doing so as if they were part of the conversation, rather than all looking solemn and serious!), checked the money and sketched out plans for 2016.
Thursday Community Meal
We met at Tracey n Rich's and discussed some of the early Christian sects/branches. Irenaeus noted some 217 different versions of church (at about 100AD). We looked at the Gnostics, Docetism and the Marcions, the beginnings of Orthodoxy, persecution by the pagani. One question we asked about these mostly historical side groups is: what if they were normal people, trying to make sense of things in their particular cultures? Why did they develop the way they did? What can we learn as today's followers of The Way?
It was a thoughtful evening and was good to hear some sharing details of their own personal journey. We closed with a simple night prayer.
Big Sunday: "Your lack of faith is disturbing" and other Star Wars wisdom!
We're trying to set up a new tradition for our big sundays, starting with thinking about who's not with us, what they're up to and how everyone is. Then we discussed and remembered good things that we've done recently. Then we learnt a new song. We like singing but we do tend to get a bit stuck on a limited set of songs!
With Star Wars 7 having taken over the minds of at least a couple of the kids, we did our big sunday with a bit of a Star Wars / wisdom theme. In Star Wars the Jedi have to train up normal people to feel 'the force', and there's some actually great quotes that when mixed in with bible verses all fit quite well! We hid some 'wisdoms' around the building and left a stack of bibles on the table. Everyone had to go find some wisdom - either from around the room or in the bibles. We brought them back and read them out and asked "is this wise?" (some were silly), "who said it?", and "what does it mean?".
After a shared lunch we made star wars spaceship paper planes - often used to transport important messages across the galaxy and transported our important wisdoms across the ... well, room. We did this as the improvisation part in a simple liturgy.
