ash wednesday

Last night was our Ash Wednesday service. Our fifth one now, and the first one not to involve burning things!!

We borrowed St Alban's church - which we use for high days and holy days. The focus for the service, coming through the readings particularly, was a call to a life of integrity - where our inner life and our outer life are in sync and one is not running ahead of the other. It's not healthy to put on a show for people - being the person we think people want us to be - whilst we are somewhere else on the inside. Similarly, it's not healthy to develop our interior life and not express this in our engagement with the world - then it just becomes a private piety.

This led to us talking about the masks that we wear - what do we try to project to people about who we are, and who are we really?? We then spent some time making masks from card and clippings from lots of different magazines etc. On one side of the mask we collaged what we show to those around us. On the other side we collaged who we felt we really were.

We then used the ashing as an affirmation of this essential, often hidden, identity. A recognition that God knows who we really are and loves us in all our brokenness.

Lily-Anna's Baptism

Last Sunday was Lily-Anna's baptism - a really important event in the life of our family and our little faith community.
Here are some photos - you should be able to work out what's going on in each one. Tess Ward co-led the service with me...there's one of the godparents...one of me doing the actual baptising...one of the 3 of us...and one of the star of the show herself.
The photos were taken by our friend Suzie - I think you'll agree she did a fine job. If you're interested, the full set can be found on her flickr page here.
I planned the service - we basically followed the Common Worship (anglican) service but with a few tweaks of our own. Towards the end we used a fantastic track by The Cinematic Orchestra while showing pictures of Lily-Anna and encouraging people to pray silently for her. We then invited people to stand one by one and offer a blessing for her life. We've collected the pieces of paper the blessings were written on and I'm going to compile them, along with a selection of the photos, and make a book for Lily to have when she's older.

Some people get very uptight about infant baptism but for me it's a fairly simple and straightforward deal. The question is this - is Lily-Anna going to be part of the community of faith or not? If she is then it's entirely appropriate for her to be baptised as baptism is the mark of being part of the covenant community. In the scriptures there are simply no categories for un-baptised members of the church. We want Lily to play a full part in the life of our little faith community and therefore she should be baptised.
Some people say that she's not old enough to know what's happening. But since when did our life with God depend on our understanding? Infant baptism symbolises beautifully for me the fact that God reaches out to us before we are ever aware of what's going on and before we are ever able to respond to God.

baptism

This Sunday is the baptism of our daughter, Lily-Anna Joy Rees. To the left is the design for a postcard invite I knocked up which we sent out a while back.
It's all a bit hectic what with friends and family coming from all over and getting things like the service itself organised - Tess Ward and myself will be getting robed up and doing the honours. It will be such a privilege to actually do the baptising bit myself.
Readers of this blog can consider themselves invited if they haven't already 'officially' been (by the receiving of said postcard).
I'll try and post some pics afterwards.

Celtic Wheel of the Year

It's been great to have Tess Ward become part of the hOME Community here in Oxford over the last few months.

She has a book out - The Celtic Wheel of the Year - which looks fab. She's leading some sessions on it at Greenbelt this coming weekend and she's asked me to provide some music for them so I've written some pieces.

Her sessions (and the book) have 4 quadrants based on the 4 seasons of the year and I've tried to write music that reflects those seasons.

The book is available on Amazon here.

stations of the resurrection

Over the last 5 weeks we've been doing the Stations of the Resurrection. Instead of 'prayer' stations we made them 'teaching' stations instead. We used 11 different passages (left out the apocryphal 'Jesus meets his mother' and the ascension + pentecost which we are saving for the coming weeks).
We laid out the 11 Stations around the room each week - the passages were printed out and there were large pieces of paper and assorted coloured pens - and each week people visited a couple of the Stations, read the passage, and wrote down any questions or thoughts they had about the passage, or drew a picture, answered questions other people had left etc. The idea being that we built on each other's theological work over the course of the 4 weeks we engaged with these Stations.
Last night we wrapped it up with a recap and a discussion on what we had been learning. I really like this Latin-American idea of entrusting the Word to the people, rather than the 'professional priest' always controlling the content.
Unfortunately I forgot to take some photos but hopefully you get the general idea.

Stations of the Cross Photos

Mel, from the the hOME community, who is a really good photographer, has some good photos of our Good Friday Stations of the Cross service here.

Mother's Day

So last Sunday in the UK was Mother's Day - or Mothering Sunday to give it it's proper title. It was a special day for us as it was obviously Pippa's first Mother's Day and our incredibly talented 10 week old daughter somehow managed to make sure Pip got a bunch of flowers and a card.

Anyway, I led the intercessions in church on Sunday night and I enjoyed preparing them. We had 4 prayer stations:

1. giving thanks and praying for our mothers. object: a glass of milk to sip from.
2. praying for women who had lost children. object: a flower with a separated petal.
3. praying for children who had lost mothers. particularly for aids orphans. object: a solitary teddy bear.
4. praying for those who have experienced the pain of childlessness. object: a pregnancy test.