Thanks to the Junior School projector, evening worship proceeded pretty much as I'd planned it. Another exploration of Heaven in Ordinary, it picked up where I'd left off with this congregation one month ago, on the eve of the Transfiguration, and worked with my own feeling of returning to earth with a bump after the heights of Greenbelt, and the melancholy end of summer, the resumption of school, the need to get on with the daily business of living.
It was heavily inspired by the Dream worship at Greenbelt, by my beloved George Herbert and also by John Davies and his Common Prayers.
We read psalm 23 and then Mike Riddell's "Urban Shepherd" and considered which, if either, was a closer expression of the real landscape of our lives, the place where we could expect to meet heaven in ordinary. I'd taken assorted shots of my route up to church, which we used as an extra focus for this, while we explored our inner landscapes using the Dream map.
We discovered with Jacob "surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it"
and I offered a few extra thoughts on the theme
I began our prayers with 3 of John's Common Prayers, giving thanks for wheelie bins, for bus stops and shopping trolleys - and these really captured the imagination. We prayed for John, too, as he walks a new landscape, finding signs of God along the M62...
A far cry from the creativity of last weekend, but a good way to bring some glimpses of Greenbelt back home.
Thanks for your prayers, Kathryn. Glad you fin my Common Prayers useful. You'll be pleased (maybe) to know that our pilgrimage through Cheltenham from Greenbelt began with a recitation of the shopping trolley prayer whilst stood among the trolleys in Waitrose car park.
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