Dear Friends,
Holy Week is almost here! As I said in my sermon last Sunday, I encourage you all to keep as full a Holy Week as possible. We are blessed to have two wonderful preachers to help us as we journey through this most sacred week of the year; God willing (or should I say pandemic willing?) Bishop Sentamu will preach most days, and Professor Katherine Grieb will lead the three-hours devotion on Good Friday. Think of this week as a kind of retreat or, better still, a kind of pilgrimage in which you enter more deeply into the passion and death of Jesus, so that Easter is filled with joy. As St. Paul reminded us in his Epistle to the Philippians, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death.” (Philippians 3:10). Celebrating a full Holy Week is putting Paul’s words into practice. As the great community theologian Kenneth Leech once said, “The Cross is not a problem to be understood, but a mystery into which we enter.”
We will be blessed with wonderful music as well as good preaching, and at Saint Thomas, the main liturgies from Holy Monday to Holy Saturday will all be at 5:30pm, so it is easy to get into a rhythm of prayer for the week.
After Easter, a number of us will be travelling to the Holy Land on pilgrimage and we will be praying for you at sacred sites as we recall some of the liturgical moments we celebrated in Holy Week. Please pray for our safety as we travel, and continue to pray for peace, and the work of the United Nations.
Speaking of peace, so many of us are shocked at some of the scenes we are seeing in Ukraine; as we enter into the mystery of Christ’s suffering and death this Holy Week, let us carry the people of Ukraine in our hearts and especially those who have lost loved ones or who have been displaced from their homes.
Many of you will realize that we are currently in another wave of the pandemic, with another variant of Omicron even more infectious than the one that some of us contracted at Christmas time. We are being very careful at the Choir School at the moment, and to that end, you may see masks being used more frequently as we navigate this particular wave. Although we have not changed our parish policy of optional mask-wearing at the moment, please think carefully about the use of a mask especially when in crowded places, and most especially if you have been exposed to someone with Covid even though you may be fully vaccinated. If the latest numbers of infections continue to grow, we may need to follow the example of other musical venues and ask everyone to mask for a short time, so that we can have our full celebration of Holy Week. In the meantime, be vigilant! To that end, I have decided not to re-introduce the common cup at the moment. I know that some of you will be disappointed at this, but the clergy and the Vestry do feel we should be cautious at this time. I also do not want to re-introduce the chalice only to have to withdraw it again later.
Finally, I was delighted with the response to the class we held last Sunday on images of the Pieta; many of you sent comments and questions. It was a joy to share all those images of beautiful yet challenging works of art with you. In particular, many of you were taken by a Pietà painted by young New Jersey artists, Tyler Ballon. Here it is accompanied by the beautiful poem of the same name by Welsh priest-poet R.S. Thomas.
Pietà by R.S. Thomas
Always the same hills
Crowd the horizon,
Remote witnesses
Of the still scene.
And in the foreground
The tall Cross,
Sombre, untenanted,
Aches for the Body
That is back in the cradle
Of a maid’s arms.
Affectionately,
Your Priest and Pastor,
Carl
