Dydd Gwyl Dewi

As the four of us dined out and were late to bed last night, I was glad that Ben was preaching this morning, weaving together thoughts of St David and the beginning of Lent. When I walked home from church, the annual St David's Day parade was assembling outside City Hall, to the drumming of a local Samba band, and people in various odd-looking costumes or band instruments were streaming down Edward VII avenue towards the assembly point. All very jolly, but I can't help wondering what St David would have thought about such cavortings any time in Lent.

This year's annual service for the Mayors of Wales was appropriately at Eglwys Dewi Sant, which meant we didn't have to adjust our morning's liturgy in any way. What we offered was certainly Lenten, but cheerful nevertheless, and with 52 communicants, that was a biggest attendance since Christmas. There were only 15 in the evening for my first Lenten address and Compline. But that's just about normal.

In the Sunday evening series, I'm looking at Jesus in relation to people of other faiths in the Gospels. I'll be posting the talks on the 'Futurefaith' blog, as we proceed.

Mental and spiritual refreshment

Started the morning with a school assembly on Jesus the Healer at Tredegarville, then celebrated the regular ten o'clock Mass at St Germans attended by a class of year three children. As the nave altar had not been put in place, we used a lovely vaulted side chapel. Seventeen children and three staff, plus another ten parishioners all squeezed in. The atmosphere was wonderful and the children so naturally quiet and attentive. It was a real pleasure. I then popped in to see Father Roy, recovering from minor surgery yesterday. He was strapped up and in pain, but full of smiles and delighted to have that little ordeal behind him.

Then I went home for a brief spell before heading to church for the midday Eucharist, re-starting after my holiday break, with two new people present. One just never knows who will turn up when the church makes its open invitation.

After lunch, I attended the the second of Archdeacon David Lee's lectures for the City URC adult education programme, called Radical Orthodoxy. He reviewed two centuries history of the rise of secular society. It was beautifully presented, and lively discussion followed. A dozen of us were there, all over 60's, and a complete ecumenical mix, which was excellent, give how very hard the churches find it to organise a single prayer event over and above the ecumenical supper we had last week, to celebrate the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. A symptom of the sad decline of interest on the part of church communities in anything outside of their own field of view.

The lecture stimulated me to return home and continue working on the Lent Lecture series I started writing while I was in Switzerland. I also propose to publish these on a website I'm developing for the purpose of making new material available to a wider audience. David has expressed willingness to allow me to publish his material also, and I have other local creative thinkers in mind as well. I'm calling the site FutureFaith. Early access to it is found here. I'll buy a proper domain name for the site, if I can get more people interested in contributing to it.