The Fellowship of St. Columbanus

Epistle: 1 Thess 4:1-8        Gospel (Roman): St Matt 17: 1-9 ;     (Sarum& BCP): St Matt 15: 21-28 Collect : Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves; keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. In the midst of life’s travails and worries, in the face of our personal failures and frustrations, we are often prone to wallow either in self-pity and pride, or in despair. We may even grumble against God and dispute the ordinances of his sovereign will. The magnitude of our sufferings weigh us down so much that we dare not call out for help. We settle upon well-rehearsed excuses (all too readily supplied by a modernist and Godless psychology) for our sins, habitual or not. We sometimes erect our sorrows and our sins...

Genesis 9:8-17                  There is a concept found in many cultures and traditions that has always attracted me. Put simply, it is the idea of the interconnectedness of all things. The ant that crawls on the stem of some forgotten leaf scratches some light itch of the universe. We are all permutations of stardust, from whence we come and shall return. This “ we ”, as God reminds us in the story of Noah, is not limited to just humanity. Birds, livestock, wild, domesticated, all living things were touched by the flood, just as all living things are affected by the actions of each member within the ecosystem. To see a World in a Grain of Sand  And a Heaven in a Wild Flower  Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand  And Eternity in an hour (Wm. Blake, Auguries of Innocence) (An icon of the Creation of the Universe) We can see in the Scriptures and the tradition that ...