Week beginning 14th September 2026

Our words for the week are by American poet Lynn Park

Take the time to pray
It is the sweet oil that eases the hinge into the garden
So the doorway can swing open easily
You can always go there

Consider yourself blessed
These stones that break your bones
Will build the altar of your love

Your home is the garden
Carry its odour, hidden in you, into the city
Suddenly your enemies will buy seed packets
And fall to their knees to plant flowers
In the dirt by the road
They’ll call you Friend
And honour your passing among them
When asked, “Who was that?” they will say,
“Oh, that one has been beloved by us since before time began.”
This, from people who would have trampled over you to maintain their advantage

Give everything away except your garden,
Your worry, your fear, your small-mindedness, your envy.
Your garden can never be taken from you.

Week beginning 7th September 2026

Our words for the week are ‘Any Morning’ by the poet William Stafford.

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown

Week beginning 31st August 2026

Our words for the week are from the book Anam Cara by John O’Donohue, ‘A blessing for solitude’.

May you recognise in your life the presence, power, and light of your soul.

May you realise that you are never alone, that your soul in its brightness and belonging connects you intimately with the rhythm of the universe.

May you have respect for your own individuality and difference.

May you realise that the shape of your soul is unique, that you have a special destiny here, that behind the facade of your life, there is something beautiful, good, and eternal happening.

May you learn to see yourself with the same delight, pride and expectation that God sees you in every moment.

For International Day of Friendship, 30th July

“When you are lost in your own life.

When the landscape you have known falls away.

When your familiar path becomes foreign
and your find yourself a stranger
in the story you had held most dear.

Then let yourself be lost.
Let yourself leave
for a place whose contours you do not already know,
whose cadences you have not learned by heart.
Let yourself land on a threshold
that mirrors the mystery of your own bewildered soul.

It will comes as a surprise,
what arrives to welcome you through the door,
making a place for you at the table
and calling you by your name.

Let what comes, come.

Let the glass be filled.
Let the light be tended.
Let the hands lay before you
what will meet you in your hunger.

Let the laughter.
Let the sweetness that enters the sorrow.
Let the solace that comes as sustenance
and sudden, unbidden grace.

For what comes, offer gladness.
For what greets you with kindly welcome, offer thanks.
Offer blessing for those who gathered you in
and will not be forgotten –

those who, when you were a stranger,
made a place for you at the table
and called you by your name.”

Welcoming Blessing by Jan Richardson

For the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, 22nd July

“Then Peter said to Mary, “Sister, we know that you are greatly loved by the Saviour, more than any other woman. Tell us those words of His that you remember, the things which you know and we don’t, the teachings we never heard.”

Mary answered, saying: “What is hidden from you I shall reveal to you. Whatever is unknown to you, and I remember, I will tell you.”

And she began saying these words to them. She said, “Once I saw the Lord in a vision and I said to him: ‘Lord, [Rabbouni,] now I see you in this vision.’

He answered me and said: ‘Blessed are you Mary, for you do not waver at the sight of me. How wonderful you are! For this is where the treasure lies – in [that place where heaven and earth meet, where deep understanding arises in the heart and mind], ‘the nous’.”

… The Soul said: “Now I have recognised this: that everything is impermanent, the whole of creation will be dissolved. All worldly things, all heavenly things, everything passes, everything will be released… I have been set free from one world with the aid of another world, from one pattern through the moulding and shaping of a greater pattern. I have been liberated from the chains of forgetfulness which are both temporary and temporal. From this moment on, now and for all seasons, I am released into silent restfulness, where time rests in the eternity of time.”

After saying these things Mary settled into silence: that place of sanctuary to which the Saviour’s words had brought her.”

From The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, translated by David Curtis

For Nelson Mandela Day, 18th July

“It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness.

I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.”

From Long Walk to Freedom (the autobiography of Nelson Mandela)

Image: Nelson Mandela’s prison cell at Robben Island

“I heard a voice speaking to me: ‘The young woman whom you see is Love. She has her tent in eternity… It was love which was the source of this creation in the beginning when God said: ‘Let it be!’ And it was. As though in the blinking of an eye, the whole creation was formed through love. The young woman is radiant in such a clear, lightning-like brilliance of countenance that you can’t fully look at her… She holds the sun and moon in her right hand and embraces them tenderly… The whole of creation calls this maiden ‘Lady.’ For it was from her that all of creation proceeded, since Love was the first. She made everything… Love was in eternity and brought forth, in the beginning of all holiness, all creatures without any admixture of evil. Adam and Eve, as well were produced by love from the pure nature of the Earth.”

Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 1179)

Image by Odilon Redon, 1899

“If you want to draw near to God,
seek him in the hearts of those around you.
Speak well of all, present or absent.
If you would be a light for others,
be like the sun: show the same face to all.
To bring joy to a single heart is better
than building countless shrines for worship;
to capture one heart through kindness is better
than setting a thousand free.
This is the true lover of God,
who lives with others,
rises and eats and sleeps like others,
gives and takes with others in the bazaar,
yet never forgets God even for a moment.”

If You Want to Draw Near to God by Abu Sa’id (967 – 1049)

For the Summer Solstice

“Don’t tell me about the end of the world.
Tell me about the beginning.
Befriend entropy.
Assume this exhalation is your last
and you are on the slope of a final heartbeat.

Be a wing that glides on gravity, rising
only by surrender, never quite knowing
how this melody is made from listened silences.

A thousand skies are raveled in a raindrop,
a thousand lives of wisdom in a tear,
last Summer’s light on a brittle twig
wrapped in a milky cocoon, a blue egg
waiting in its mother-swirl of sticks,
she too the shaper of galaxies.

Relax into uncertainty, into the wound
of not knowing, into the sound
of what happened before creation
in the brilliant beginning-less core
of this moment.

Come taste and see
the diamond-pointed bindhu
between the mirrors,
between the world and its beholder,
here, where what flows out
meets what flows in,
a tiny wild flower of grace
that glows only an inch or two
in front of your chest.

Don’t tell me how it ends,
tell me how it begins.
How this breath is given
because you surrendered that one.”

How It Begins by Alfred K. LaMotte