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St Mary Magdalen

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In this Year of Mercy, Pope Francis has raised 22nd July, when we remember St Mary Magdalen, from being a Memorial to a Feast (Gloria etc). She suffers from mistaken identity, being confused with the woman taken in adultery or the one who came in from the street, whereas the only reference to her past in the Gospels is that Jesus cast out 7 spirits from her. More importantly, she was a faithful disciple right to the Crucifixion. Then she was the first to meet the risen Lord, and so became the first to share the Good News – the “Apostle to the Apostles”.

Here Malcolm Guite, Anglican priest and poet based in Cambridge, writes about her in sonnet form.

Men called you light so as to load you down,
And burden you with their own weight of sin,
A woman forced to cover and contain
Those seven devils sent by Everyman.
But one man set you free and took your part,
One man knew and loved you to the core.
The broken alabaster of your heart
Revealed to him alone a hidden door,
Into a garden where the fountain sealed,
Could flow at last for him in healing tears,
Till, in another garden, he revealed
The perfect love that cast out all your fears,
And quickened you with love’s own sway and swing,
As light and lovely as the news you bring.

From “Sounding the Seasons”, Malcolm Guite, 2012

Mametz Wood

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This weekend we remember the taking of Mametz Wood, part of the Battle of the Somme, in which 600 Welsh soldiers died and thousands were wounded.

For years afterwards the farmers found them –
the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades
as they tended the land back into itself.
A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,
the relic of a finger, the blown
and broken bird’s egg of a skull,
all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white
across this field where they were told to walk, not run, towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.
And even now the earth stands sentinel,
reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened
like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin. This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,
a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,
their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre
in boots that outlasted them,
their socketed heads tilted back at an angle
and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.
As if the notes they had sung
have only now, with this unearthing,
slipped from their absent tongues.

Copyright 2005 Owen Sheers, South Wales poet, author and presenter

Whose year? Whose mercy?

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We are in the Year of Mercy – but whose mercy? We are half way through the Year of Mercy called for by Pope Francis, and in the first half there was an emphasis on God’s mercy to us, especially in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. However, as the logo banners show, the whole point of the Year is that we learn from God’s mercy so that we can show mercy ourselves: “Misericordes sicut Pater – Merciful Like the Father”..

Through the summer we will be featuring a series of articles in this newsletter highlighting the so-called Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy. We will point out ways that we are carrying them out now, and suggest ways that we might do more as individuals or as a Christian community. Also during the summer we will celebrate the Year of Mercy in our day trip to Belmont Abbey.

But first we congratulate one of our 3 Churches family on being honoured by society for his works of mercy – at the risk of embarrassing him! This month Denis Donovan of Christ the King will receive the Order of Mercy at the London Mansion House, in recognition of his long-term support of the George Thomas Hospice.

The Order – which in fact is nothing to do with the Pope’s Year – is given by the League of Mercy each year to up to 50 individuals who have given outstanding service over an extended period to charities or organizations. The relevant areas are the sick, injured and disabled, young people who are at risk, the homeless, the elderly, the dying and those who are impaired in mind. We might note that these cover many of the areas of the corporal works of mercy. The League itself was founded under Royal Charter of Queen Victoria in 1899 and renewed in 1999 as a charity.

So, congratulations Denis! His example makes a good start to our summer reflection on how we can share with the world God’s mercy to us.

Fr Matthew