Colourful Dreamer

Today, Pentecost Sunday marks the end of the great season of Easter. A season 50 days long - one seventh of the year. It is our great Sunday which began on the day of the resurrection and ends today on a Sunday. During this time have we celebrated the resurrection, ascension, and the sending of the Spirit. Now we enter into Ordinary Time where we see these three great themes at play in all creation, working and in through creation, and in and through ordinary people of all cultures and ethnicities, forming God’s just communities. Pentecost is first and foremost a Jewish festival. Tradition stated that 50 days after the Hebrew slaves were freed from Egypt (remembered at The Passover) the Hebrews, now a free people, arrived at the Mountain of God to receive the Law. Pentecost was a festival commemorating the gift of the Torah. Torah was not seen as the rules to be obeyed to earn God’s blessing, but a describer of what it meant to live in the presence of God freely given. Pente...

This can be heard here Gate Pa -  Ascension Sunday and Easter 7 Year B Readings: Palm                            Psalm 1 First Reading:             Acts 1:1-11, 15-17,21-26                     Bible Page 884 Second Reading:        1 John 5:9-13                                       Bible Page 991 Gospel:                         John 17:6-19     ...

This Sunday we will celebrate the Ascension.So what is that all about? Bosco Peters on his Liturgy website offers us this reflection (which I have slightly edited) “There is much to enrich us in monastic spirituality. Benedictine spirituality in many ways is the undergirding spirituality of Anglicanism. The monastic tradition of “fuga mundi” (“flee the world”), however, is too easily misinterpreted as an anti-creation, other-worldly, so-heavenly-minded-as-to-be-of-no-earthly-use spirituality. This has little validity in a world in ecological crisis, or in a religion that believes in Incarnation. And resurrection. And sacraments. God did not dress up in a human body and then discard this at death, returning to some preferable spiritual state. God’s hypostatic union to creation is permanent. Christ retains his full, created, creaturely, humanity in the resurrection. Including his body. The Ascension proclaims and celebrates Christ takes this creation into the full presence o...