Day 3 of Walk 2022
The beautiful sunrise set the day up with the reminder of the Risen Lord meeting the disciples on the seashore. Day 2 was a true blessing, meeting Laura who was in distress looking for her puppy, asking for our prayers. We then met our dear friend Michael Stone, with his reassuring presence and words of encouragement. We followed the Causey Mounth Way up to Portlethen where a sign post blown by the wind pointed us off course. We drifted 6 miles before returning to the path. We took the wings and flew to Stonehaven. Stonehaven was in grief loosing Allan. Allan is a friend of Nigel, a gifted drummer, very intelligent and dynamic, a sensing soul. Amu and I played with him at a Charity event in Blue Lamp in the Gallowgate. Allan took his life during an episode of distress two weeks ago and it was his funeral that plunged the community into grief. Many attended the celebration of his life and it was a blessing to meet several people in Stonehaven, afterwards. One in particular was Sarah, a colleague of Allan at the Stonehaven Leisure Centre. Sarah fed us with some amazing Carrot and Coriander soup. Connected us to the staff at the Leisure Centre who were pleased to see us and were most compassionate. The whole experience of loosing Allan, sharing in the grief of the loved ones and listening to people heightened my sense to the need for care and support of people with mental health issues and reinforced one of the purposes of this walk for Healing, Peace and Revival. Please pray that the Peace that the risen Christ proclaimed will be real to every human soul, especially those who suffer deep distress of the soul.
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Mark Walker, Nigel Lammas and Isaac Poobalan launch their walk tonight at St Andrew's Cathedral, Aberdeen with a Choral Evensong. The Folk Musicians of the North East of Scotland will sing Wa Hamba Nathi, a Zulu song to set off the trio on their walk. The launch will commence at St Andrew's and will be completed at the Southbank of River Dee at the Shrine of our Lady of Aberdeen. You are warmly invited to join us.
The Lord Provost will join the walk along with various friends of the Trio from around the city and beyond. Ellie Milne from the Press and Journal wrote this article in the local media. Rector of Aberdeen cathedral to walk to London to mark Queen's Jubilee (pressandjournal.co.uk) Today we celebrated the utmost gift of love in the giving of Jesus Christ, his body and blood in the bread and wine of the Passover meal in the Upper Room. What may have seemed to be the simplest of ceremonial act by Jesus turned to something most extraordinary by the words that the Lord spoke and meaning and significance it took.
It is the easiest of temptations - to domesticate the works of power by God and turn it into a ritual. Rituals have the power to carry beliefs, ideas and memory in the most secure form and unless it's purpose and significance is renewed year by year through teaching, preaching and contemplation. The ritual we performed today goes back to the beginnings of Judaism, given new meaning by the Lord and celebrated today back in the Upper Room. There is a Pathe video clip of Corpus Christi celebrated in the Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool in 1934 attended by 30,000 people. That gives a better perspective of what we celebrated today. The Real Presence of our Lord, the living and life giving body of Jesus Christ is not only visible in the sacrament held in splendour in the monstrance, but in greater glory in the hearts of God's people, i.e. you and I. It is therefore a good reason to celebrate the real presence of God in the world through you and I. God so loved the world that he gave … John 3.16
Dear Friend, Good morning and welcome to the Feast of the Holy Trinity which we celebrate today on this most beautiful day, the penultimate day of the Spring in the meteorological calendar. In the Liturgical calendar, we celebrate the blessing of what our Liturgy calls that ‘wonderful exchange’. The boundless out pouring of God’s love finds a new meaning and purpose in the new creation called the Church. The revelation of God, the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier in the Church makes this wonderful exchange a Feast, a time to celebrate. The icon by the Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev captures the meaning and purpose most powerfully. At the time of Rublev, in the 15th century Russia, the Holy Trinity was the embodiment of spiritual unity, peace, harmony, mutual love and humility. The scene is the hospitality of Abraham to the three angels under the oak of Mamre. Abraham, a pilgrim on a journey to inherit the promises of God extends the hospitality to strangers. It all sounds too familiar to us, the people of St Andrew’s. in 1715 when the exiled king came to Aberdeen, he received hospitality in the very location of the Upper Room, in the house of Jean Kinnaird and Alexander Scott, Episcopalians of the North East of Scotland. The extension of hospitality to Samuel Seabury in 1784 remains our hallmark of hospitality. The hospitality we extended to the New Scots from Syria marked us out as the presence of the Triune God in the city of Aberdeen. Therefore we have every reason to celebrate today. We shall gather for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist from the Upper Room at 3pm. A link to the livestream on our Facebook page will be sent out 10 minutes before the service. A draft version of the Order of Service is attached here and on our website. We continue in prayer for the day when we can gather as a people to offer up ourselves to God in the house of prayer God has blessed us with, graciously. May God bless us as we continue to witness to the Good News of God’s love and Christ Jesus. As ever, Your fellow Pilgrim on a journey to inherit the promises of God. Isaac The streets are strewn with flowers, and the drums don’t cease…
By Dr Anu Rose, Christian Medical College, Vellore, South India Someone, unfamiliar with the culture of rural India, reading the title of this, will imagine I am describing a festival, or, like the biblical passage describing Jesus’s entry to Jerusalem -the welcome into a village of an important person… But in India, in the rural areas, a death is announced by drums, with a very specific beat. During a funeral procession, the mourners strew the path to the cremation ground with flowers, usually bright marigolds. I travel 2 hours to a clinic run by Christian Medical College, Vellore, South India, in a tribal belt. Lately I’ve been going to the clinic 3 days a week, and every day, when we traverse a village, we hear the drums and see the path to the cremation ground marked by fresh bright flowers… It has been more than a year since the pandemic hit. The second wave is much worse than what we anticipated. The people are frightened, tired, and hope of an end to this is waning. People are faced by situations which 2 years ago will seem fictitious…bodies floating in the river Ganges… the loss of close family members, loss of livelihood, fear of more death and illness and prohibitively high costs of treatment, unavailability of vaccines, terrifying images on the TV news of people, rich and poor alike, pleading for treatment, admission to hospital and Oxygen. Long lines of bodies waiting to be cremated, crematoriums working through the day and night… loved ones being buried or cremated in mass graves and pyres… no closure or chances to say goodbye, to touch a loved ones hand in farewell , or look upon a beloved face one last time… And the traditional methods of comfort and support are all gone. No visits to a family member or friends house to console or to encourage. No church service on Sunday mornings…. How long Lord? Why Lord? Why us Lord? History teaches us that periodically human kind has suffered immensely. The world wars, the famines, the influenza pandemic in the early 1900’s…and yet we survive. And we flourish. In the book of psalms, King David exclaims in entranced wonder ‘what is man that you are mindful of him , the son of man that you care for him”. But now, our feelings resonate more with Job’s rendition of similar words. Job said, “what is man that thou should magnify him? And thou should set thy heart upon him. And that thou should visit him every morning and try him every moment. How long wilt thou not depart from me, not let me alone….” Job’s words are a description of what many are feeling now, the circle of human suffering, ‘my days are swifter than a weavers shuttle, and are spent without hope. ‘when I say my bed shall comfort me and my couch shall ease my complaint. Then thou scarest me with dreams and terrify me through visions … ‘ Again, why Lord. Why now? We were a blessed generation. Human flourishing has never been so evident. We have mapped the universe you created, we think we understand our ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ selves as we have mapped our genome, we are exploring new planets to relocate to, in this vast universe you created. Yet we have been brought to our knees by a miniscule microbe, the whole world is being held hostage. May be this is an indication that we have not spent enough time on our knees. Is that why Lord? In our rush to conquer the universe, we have left many of your children behind. We spend enormous resources on finding other planets to live in, while many among us have no homes , we use our fruits and vegetables to produce products to change our external appearance, when our hearts don’t change enough to realize these will be enough to feed a family in many places. The pandemic has given us time away from self-made hectic schedules to introspect, and we are ashamed Lord… So like the plagues of old, are you punishing us? Job said, ‘Happy is the man whom God corrected, therefore despise not the chastening of the almighty…’ Stop Lord, we have learnt our lesson. Or as Job admonished his wife, “shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil? What you choose to send us, Lord we cannot escape from, be they blessings or a curse…We are created beings, small, powerless, dependent on your providence, prone to sin, and with numbered days. Can we question your actions Lord. Can we dare to question your omnipresence when your children are pleading for mercy, yet receiving no answer? Can we wonder at your compassion Lord, in the face of all this suffering, or are we validated in our thoughts that you are an unchanging God and your anger and fury described in the old testament are still a part of our current generations. Do not be angry with us Lord, for our poor understanding of your purposes and our feeble attempts to make theological meaning of the events we are living through. While human kind is ravaged with suffering, the rest of your creation is flourishing. The forests are greener, with fewer footfalls and littering, the skies are clear, we have been too immersed in our suffering to pollute it. The animals have become bolder, glimpses of them are seen in urban areas, they seem to hope that now some of the earth belongs to them too. Like Jobs three friends, we are trying to understand and attribute meaning Lord, and we are tempted to simplistically attribute everything to being punished for our sinful ways. Help us to accept Lord- there are things too wonderful for us to understand, as Job accepts. While we mourn and weep with our fellow brethren, in our time of sorrow, we are drawn closer to you, to seek you to trust your wisdom and know you are in control. Let us not ask where you are in the midst of our pain, but where we are, do we trust in you ,our Creator, or lean on our own understanding. While we are tempted to find explanations we wait for you to speak Lord. We seek, and you will deliver us from our fears. We cry out to you and you will save us out of our troubles. As you have been merciful to the generations of humans before, you will be Gracious to us, as You are an unchanging God and deliver those who fear you. We will trust and wait with hope for the dawning of the day when we will come to you in the silence of the early morning, and the only sounds we hear will be the joyful noise of the birds as we join your creation in giving thanks for the new beginning. Today, I invited my classmates from the Christian Medical College in Vellore, South India who now live and work in almost every nation under the sun for a time of Intercessory Prayers as the situation in India is worsening every minutes with the deaths from COVID 19 is estimated to peak in mid May. Some of them are very senior ranking both in the Government and in Christian Mission Hospitals with responsibilities for thousands of healthcare professionals engaged in fight against COVID 19. Each of them heart reding stories, with some very personal accounts.
One of them, who is a Pastor in Melbourne, Australia opened the prayers. She began with the words from the Lamentations of Prophet Jeremiah. 18 Cry aloud to the Lord! O wall of daughter Zion! Let tears stream down like a torrent day and night! Give yourself no rest, your eyes no respite! 19 Arise, cry out in the night, at the beginning of the watches! Pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord! Lift your hands to him for the lives of your children, who faint for hunger at the head of every street. We spent over an hour in Intercessory Prayers with tears and sighs. It reminded me of the lost art of Lament in the Christian Tradition. I also felt how desperately Lament is needed in beloved Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney and at St Andrew’s as we journey through some turbulent times. In 2018 when life was turbulent in the diocese, St Andrew’s lead the way in inviting people to Lament and Reconciliation. We will revisit it now, with the grace of God, as we emerge from the grips of Pandemic yet with the longing to ‘worship God without fear in holiness and righteousness’ and reach out to those who remain in distress. While thinking about a Liturgy of Lament I received an email from our friend from Canada, Marion Thompson, a copy of the Icon of ‘Synaxis of All Saints who shone forth in Scotland’. The bottom of the Icon has this prayer which will shape our Liturgy of Lament, ‘All Saints of God, Pray to God for us. On this our 26th wedding anniversary, I called the family scattered around in India to learn of their welfare and the situation in their neighbourhoods. My brother who lives in Bangalore, India said that in the neighbourhood where they used to live, 24 people died yesterday for lack of Oxygen. People with symptoms of COVID need concentrated oxygen for a short period due to compromised lungs. When this is not available at the right time, death is inevitable. Please continue to pray for the people of India as we continue in prayer for the people of our Diocese and St Andrew’s. The words of the Lord, spoken to the Disciples in the Upper Room, now heard by the disciples afresh in the Easter Season are words of intimacy, inspiration and empowerment. The words of our Lord take a new meaning and purpose and the intimacy between the Lord and His disciples reaches a higher level. The Disciples, as branches of the living and life giving, crucified and risen Lord are immensely glorious for they no longer rely on themselves to bear fruit but on their risen and glorified Lord and Master. You and I are invited to that new life today.
The secret behind these incredibly beautiful fruits is where we find ourselves today. There can be no luscious fruits without pruning. And we as People of God at St Andrew’s and as People of God in the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney, we have been praying, ‘Thy Kingdom Come’. And God answers our prayers in the most mysterious way and it seems like a season of pruning for us now. We therefore hold our Bishop, the Officers of the Diocese, the Clergy the and whole Priesthood of God in our prayers. We are pray for Prof Iain Torrance who is walking alongside us in this journey. Pandemic has been a time of pruning to make us fruitful. We will look back on this period not with a reminiscence of how we survived but how God was with us to make us more fruitful, removing all that hindered us from being fruitful and making us the Splendour of the Church. May God strengthen you as you remain faithful and strong, firm in the hope God has set before us. The coming week is an important time for us here in Scotland and in Aberdeen as we go to vote to elect the next government. We pray for the People of Scotland and all those who have committed themselves to serve this city and this nation as Members of Scottish Parliament. The candidates for our region are as follows: Aberdeen Donside: Harriet Cross (Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party), Isobel Davidson (Scottish Liberal Democrats), Jackie Dunbar (Scottish National Party SNP), Lucas Grant (Scottish Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition), Heather Herbert (Scottish Labour Party). Aberdeen Central: Barry Black (Scottish Labour Party), Desmond Bouse (Scottish Liberal Democrats), Guy Ingerson (Scottish Green Party), Douglas Lumsden (Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party), Kevin Morrice Stewart (Scottish National Party SNP). Aberdeen South and North Kincardine: Stephen Jamieson (Scottish Libertarian Party), Liam Kerr (Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party), Audrey Nicholl (Scottish National Party SNP), Lynn Thomson (Scottish Labour Party), Ian Yuill (Scottish Liberal Democrats). There are several others who regional candidates. We remember them all in our prayers. And within the St Andrew’s family we pray for Liam Kerr and Douglas Lumsden. God bless you and keep you blessing as you remain strong and steadfast in your call to a fruitful life in the family of St Andrew’s. As ever, Isaac |
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