Prayer Vigil for Sri Lanka.

Fr Tom Herbst OFM, an occasional contributor to the Agnellusmirror blog, sent this notice today on  behalf of Kent University Chaplaincy.

We are organizing- at very short notice- a candle/prayer vigil at Uni as a memorial for the Sri Lanka victims. It will be held at 8:00 PM beginning outside Eliot College then moving into the chapel. If you can make it that would be great as we would like to see as many people there as possible. Can you pass the word to people who may be interested? Maybe announce on your blog?

If you can make it this evening, that would be good. If not, please spare a moment around 8.00 to join us in prayer.

MMB

Precious greenery in the city.

Mrs T’s reading before going to Venice was the guidebook and Salley Vickers’ Miss Garnet’s Angel. I’m not sure which was better preparation for our visit. My book made more sense once we were in the city, and helped make sense of the city. Ellis Peters, best known for Cadfael and all things Salopian, wrote Holiday with Violence soon after the Second World War, during which Venice escaped bombing but endured great hardship. There are glimpses of that poverty, of the rundown buildings, and also of the precious green spaces:

She saw in the drowned shade of the little waterways, narrow between high palace walls, the occasional green of trees looking out from secret gardens, in a city where all the rest of the spectrum was spilt recklessly, but green was jealously hoarded.

Such a secret garden can be seen on the background to this picture. Some of these plots had walls surmounted with a hedge of Canary Ivy, home to blackbirds which had their singing posts nearby to celebrate the dawn and dusk chorus, all the more audible with the lack of motor traffic.

If we make room for nature, nature will move in!

 

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‘You’ve made my day’, said Mrs T.

George had just spotted a tadpole in the garden pond.

After a bunch of frog spawn had gone to Miss T’s Butterflies class of 4-5 year-olds, and another clump to our friend ‘Frog’, Mrs T was convinced that what remained was never going to hatch. Well, at least one egg has done what it was meant to do! This is how things looked a few weeks ago.

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A windy day in Canterbury

Eleanor captured a misty day in Canterbury. 

It was a windy day in Canterbury, so windy I did not light up the L’Arche garden incinerator (and who doesn’t like a fire outdoors?).

Home at the end of the morning to hang out the washing: Saint Stephen’s bells are ringing, and a bagpipe playing, blown on the wind which had changed direction so that I had to cycle against it going out and coming in.

Opening the emails, here was part of the day’s reading, an old favourite of a tale from Daniel. Nebuchadnezzar had set up his golden statue:

“Be ready now to fall down and worship the statue I had made,
whenever you hear the sound of the trumpet,
flute, lyre, harp, psaltery, bagpipe,
and all the other musical instruments;
otherwise, you shall be instantly cast into the white-hot furnace;
and who is the God who can deliver you out of my hands?” Daniel 3:4-6

Of course we know what happened: Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused to worship the statue, were thrown into the furnace, and were joined by a fourth person,  identified as the angel of the Lord.

I guess the music of the bells and pipes was for a wedding. Let’s hope that the angel of the Lord will be with the couple in all their trials and all their joys.