In these times when anger Is turned into anxiety And someone has stolen The horizons and the mountains,
Our small emperors on parade Never expect our indifference To disturb their nakedness
They keep their heads down And their eyes gleam with reflection From Aluminum economic ground,
The media wraps everything In a cellophane of sound, And the ghost surface of the virtual Overlays the breathing earth.
The industry of distraction Makes us forget That we live in a universe
We have become converts To the religion of stress And its deity of progress
That we may have courage To turn aside from it all
And come to kneel down before the poor, To discover what we must do, How to turn anxiety Back into anger, How to find our way home.
‘Blessing for citizenship’ by John O’Donohue
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Image: New York City at night, looking east along West 45th St.
Photographer: Paulo Barcellos Jr, 2006, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence.
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In St Mary’s prayer cycle for June 2020, today we give thanks for all acts of kindness we may have received recently.
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Please donate if you can!
In these unprecedented times, St Mary’s is reaching out and supporting our community in many ways, especially online. But with Services in church cancelled, we no longer receive income from collections, nor from hiring out the church and hall buildings.
If you can help us financially to continue to offer Christ's love to our community in these difficult times, as those before us have done down the centuries, please consider making a donation by debit/credit card and to Gift Aid it if possible, by clicking this link to 'givealittle':
Thank you!
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If you would like to contribute to these reflections, please do email Katherine Cox at kvcox-therapy@gmail.com
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To keep up to date with how we continue the life of St Mary’s in these difficult times – including our ‘Icons of the Day’, Fr Jeff’s and Fr Piotr’s pastoral letters and reflections, weekly Zoom services and more – do please ‘like’ our Facebook page @StMarysTwickenham and bookmark our website www.stmarytwick.org.uk