If you have not read the thank you
card on the noticeboard here’s what
it says:
To the members of St Oswald’s
Scottish Episcopal Church
I am writing to say a huge thank you for your wonderful donation of £198 for
Cancer Research UK which you raised at your Harvest Festival.
Many thanks
Carol Grant
THOUGHTS FOR THE NEW YEAR RESCUED FROM THE OLD
Every year I get an Advent Calendar which is published in Hamburg,
Germany under the title: ‘A different kind of Advent’. It contains thoughts for
the day, some of those I would like to share with you.
DO YOU PRAY
That is a question which usually irritates people. The question is
embarrassing and so is the answer.
Praying is considered child-like, childish, since a prayer would have been the
first encounter with faith for a child.
Yet the Good-Night prayer verses, which grandmothers have taught, have
remained intimately familiar. Often prayer is the first and the last thing
people do in their lives, Alpha and Omega.
Do you pray? The question is considered to be impudent. Those asking and
answering know that prayer does need a remnant of child-like trust, it means
talking to some being which does not answer readily.
That is naive, curious, suspect, a remnant of the old un-enlightened times in
our secular world. Is that so?
Is praying an unreasonable act?
Prayer is more alive than the churches which teach it. It is more lively,
because you don’t necessarily need the church’s teaching or hierarchy for it.
Prayer gives language to needs, it by-passes ‘speechless desperation’, it
gives words to happiness and to misery, there is nothing which cannot be
said, even up to crying: ’My God, why have you forsaken me!’- This cry in
extremis is already a beginning: He that cries is not stuck in resignation but
has started to act against the injury done to him and to others.
(Heribert Prantl)
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