the prophets said you would bring peace
and save your people in trouble.
Give peace in our hearts at Christmas
and show all the world God's love.
Amen.
'Sweet singing in the choir...'
This evening Clare, Chris and the choir will meet at 19.00, as they do each Friday, to prepare the music for the following Sunday. They're always looking ahead too, because of course some of the music they sing is more difficult, and needs more than a single run-through before it's sung in worship! And at this time of year, with Nine Lessons and Carols on Sunday 18th, Blue Christmas on 21st, and the Christmas Eve services, there's more music to think about in one go than at any other season. Up to forty different singers will be in our choir stalls at various times during the year. Is this typical of churches around the diocese? Not so much! In terms of the numbers of singers and what they achieve St. Peter's is highly unusual. If there are 400 or so churches in the diocese, only twenty or so at most will be as fortunate as we are. And in having Chris to play for our services we are similarly blessed. There are very few organists so skilled and in the prime of life. Reasons to be cheerful!
Another chance to hear Chris...
Tomorrow (Saturday) morning in church at 10.30 and 11.30 a.m. you can hear Chris play a short recital of pieces for the Christmas season. Organ music by Bach,Brahms, Walther, Scarlatti, Vierne and Debussy. Don't miss out on the opportunity to hear Chris at slightly greater length than on a Sunday. And at 10.00, Vince will play a short sequence of piano music by American composers, and before Chris's second stint, an Advent song set at 11.00.
Last chance to see...
...this week's Prayer Space in church today and tomorrow...
Here's a dark, even prophetic, poem by W.B.Yeats which some of you may know, written soon after the end of World War 1. You might think it matches the way things are with our modern world uncomfortably closely. If you're following an Advent discipline (and the same might be even more true in Lent) do you find there's a moment when you think 'Enough!'? But of course, without the experience of those dark places, the redemption, the coming of the light, would never seem so dramatic...
The Second Coming by W.B.Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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