Saturday Compline & cocoa (from The Campfire Church retreat Journey into Light)

 #1 GATHERING

Welcome, friends.

Please take your place in this community of love and prayer

as night falls and we close the day together

and travel into silence.

 

#2  PRAYER

God of all life

God of the darkness as of the light

God of the unseen world as well as the visible

You see in the darkness

You speak hope into our uncertainty

And strength into our vulnerability.

As the day ends and we make ready to go to bed

Under the gathered clouds and the stars

Under the moon sailing above us across the sky

Under the protection of your love and power

We entrust ourselves to you

We place everything into you hands.

God of Earth and Heaven,

We are yours.

Amen

#3 SONG

Giving it all to you — Geraldine Latty

#4 REFLECTIONS TO THINK ON

 

The British Isles were first evangelised by Columba’s monks from Iona.

They got a long way.

Where I live, in East Sussex, there were inaccessible and resistant pockets that Augustine of Canterbury’s missionary activities in the 6th century never managed to reach. There’s a saying in Sussex, “We won’t be druv,” and that applied to religious conversion as well as everything else. 

But the monks of Iona got through, which is why when King Offa gave a portion of land in East Sussex to the glory of God in perpetuity, the deeds reference Celtic, not Roman, Christianity.

One wise and gentle tactic of the Iona monks was to establish Christian practice alongside the Old Religion, rather than tossing out or discrediting the spiritual path the people had always trod, based on the round of the agricultural year and the seasons of the light.

So, for instance, they settled the feast of the Incarnation, the birth of the Infant Light of the World, just adjacent to Yul (which means “the turn”), at the deepest and darkest, coldest, most forlorn time of year. Into our darkness the living light is born, bringing us hope. Jesus wasn’t born in December, he was born around September — it’s not a birthday celebration. It’s the monks showing the people of the ancient Celtic world, by juxtaposition with their established ceremonies, the meaning of the Gospel.

And they didn’t rival or displace or push aside the ceremonies of the Celtic wheel of the year; they just placed the new stories and observances next to them, so people could see the similarities and understand the teaching.

The festival of Imbolc runs through from the evening of February 1st to the evening of February 2nd — because the Celtic day started at sunset — and the Christian feast of Candlemas is placed alongside it on February 2nd. 

Imbolc was one of the fire festivals, so the monks made Candlemas a time when, as the days were lengthening now and the light was getting stronger, everyone could bring a candle from home to the church for a festival of light. They made that connection between Jesus and light — the Gospel teaching that Jesus is the light of the world.

And Imbolc is also the time for cleaning your home, and the clear, lucid February light shows up all the dust and cobwebs; it’s time to sweep out the house. And it’s Brigid’s tide — protector of the home — when the celebrations, making use of water and milk, have specifically feminine connections. Like visiting the holy wells; the ancient Celts saw wells (springs, water sources) as the opening of the womb of the earth, like waters breaking when a child is born. The neck of the cervix is call the os, and there’s a place in Yorkshire called Osmotherly after the holy well there — the womb opening of Mother Earth.

So the Christian feast of Candlemas set alongside the festival of Imbolc was made a celebration of the purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary after childbirth — which would have been 40 days after Jesus was born.

It speaks of welcoming the growing and strengthening light, of purification and cleansing, of the ways of women and the home.  As we’ve heard from Grace, the word Imbolc may have its origins in the Irish word for “in the belly”, and refer to the time of quickening felt by the mother; some people suggest it comes from the word meaning “lamb’s milk”; and there is a suggestion that it’s linked to a time of ritual cleansing and purification. So it became the time to think of the stirring of spiritual light within us, or of Jesus the Lamb of God as a young child at the breast of his mother — or of the purification of mother Mary after the birth of her baby Jesus.

There is so much to think of here, capturing the holiness that we touch when we connect with the Earth and her seasons, with the ordinary rhythms of life and humanity, with the simple tasks of sweeping the house and washing ourselves ad feeding our children.

This, thought the ancient Celts and affirmed the monks of Iona, is where we find God — or where his Light finds us.

#5 PRAYER FOR THE WORLD

Watch now, dear Lord, 

with those who watch or weep tonight,

and give your angels charge over those who sleep. 

Tend your sick ones, O Lord Christ, 

rest your weary ones,

 bless your dying ones, 

soothe your suffering ones, 

have mercy on your afflicted ones, 

shield your joyous ones

 – and all for your love’s sake.

#6 CLOSING PRAYERS

O Trinity of love

You have been with us at the world’s beginning

Be with us till the world’s end

You have been with us at our life’s shaping

Be with us at our life’s end

You have been with us at the sun’s rising

Be with us at the day’s end.     (Iona)

God be in my head and in my understanding;

God be in my eyes and in my looking;

God be in my mouth and in my speaking;

God be in my heart and in my thinking;

God be at mine end, and at my departing.    (The Sarum Prayer)