Author: Fr. Matthew

St. Joseph.

Silent, hard working, content to work in the shadows.

Last week Pope Francis announced that from December 8th 2020 to December 8th 2021 there would be a jubilee year of St. Joseph. 

This news lifted my spirits no end. St. Joseph is often one of our most overlooked Saints. 

He’s overlooked because he just gets on with it. He is quiet, he is faithful, he is determined, he is a loving father who teaches Jesus how to be a man.

Pope Francis explains his example to us in this way:

“…during these months of pandemic, when we experienced, amid the crisis, how “our lives are woven together and sustained by ordinary people, people [are] often overlooked.

People who do not appear in newspaper and magazine headlines, or on the latest television show, yet in these very days are surely shaping the decisive events of our history. 

Doctors, nurses, storekeepers and supermarket workers, cleaning personnel, caregivers, transport workers, men and women working to provide essential services and public safety, volunteers, priests, men and women religious, and so very many others. They understood that no one is saved alone… How many people daily exercise patience and offer hope, taking care to spread not panic, but shared responsibility.”

So then I ask you, how can we offer daily patience, hope and care to those around us?

Fr. Matthew

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Other news

Christmas services:

All the Christmas services can be found on a special page here – the headline services are:

• Christmas Eve, 3pm – Christingle & Crib service (please book here). 
• Christmas Eve 11:30pm – Midnight Mass.
• Christmas Day, 10am – Parish Mass.

The children’s Christmas card’s are now available to buy in church. They are £6 a pack of 12 (very reasonable!). You can pay in cash in church or via PayPal / Bank Transfer – details on the Giving Page.

Please keep hold of your stamps for the RNIB Christmas Campaign, a box will soon appear in church to collect them. Please ask Susan Chick for details. 

Refugee update. I now have a complete list of what is needed where and will be sharing it on Sunday – on the website and in Church. We’ll collect this week and bring everything into church by Sunday 20th for distribution to the hotels.

Not wanted.

There’s no room at the inn.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been involved with several zoom video conferences about the plight of the refugees stuck in London. 

In usual circumstances refugees arrive at the port (in this case Heathrow) and are housed in temporary accommodation (generally B&Bs) before being re-located to a more permeant home elsewhere in the country.

Since the start of the COVID outbreak and the subsequent lockdowns people have been trapped in B&Bs, temporary accommodation and now ‘contingency hotels’. There are currently the better part of 3000 people housed in these places in North West London alone. 

It’s hard not to draw a parallel with the nativity story and wondering what it must feel like to not be wanted. In North West London there are not enough school places, not enough give in the health system and not enough food, clothing and other essentials to go around. 

Several charities have been doing their best to support the refugees but things are starting to break. People are going hungry, they are wearing their only set of clothes and they are isolated and alone. 

We at St. Anselm can reach out of these people in the coming weeks of Advent. Indeed – it is a Gospel demand that we do so. I’ll be asking you for specific things (clothing, shoes, toys) next week to take to hotels near us. I’ll be asking churches near other centres housing refugees to do the same and I know – without a shadow of a doubt – that our community will rally and that there wont be a single child who doesn’t get a present this Christmas, who goes hungry, who feels alone and not wanted.

Fr. Matthew

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Other news

The children’s Christmas card’s are now available to buy in church. They are £6 a pack of 12 (very reasonable!). You can pay in cash in church or via PayPal / Bank Transfer (ask Fr. Matthew for the details).

Please keep hold of your stamps for the RNIB Christmas Campaign, a box will soon appear in church to collect them. Please ask Susan Chick for details. 

Expectations.

A time of waiting and wanting.

When a family discovers the joyful news of a baby on the way everyone in that family, and perhaps most especially the mother, years to see the face of the child being born. 

It’s not a desire that can easily be fulfilled. There is waiting – nine months of it – where dreams are dreamt, desires uncovered, names discussed (and perhaps argued about), distant futures built. 

This dreaming and desire cannot be put away. This excitement and joy cannot be stifled – and nor should it be.

It is this joy, excitement, patience and growing love that we experience most profoundly during Advent. 

We await the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ on Christmas Day. We don’t have to wait nine months – but a mere four weeks. 

In that four weeks we can explore that desire, hope, joy, expectation, trepidation, fear and love that all newborns cause in their family.

We can start to glimpse – in a tiny tiny way – the joy and love that is coming our way. We can prepare our hearts to receive that awesome love in its fulness on Christmas morning. 

This is a time for preparation, to get our house in order, to build the crib, to get our lives in the right place and our hearts ready for the coming of Jesus in the crib. 

How? We most fully do that in the Mass. Try to come a little more often during Advent and hold that small child in your minds eye. 

Consider what you need to get ready for the arrival of this most special of children.

Fr. Matthew

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Other News

From Wednesday 2nd we re-open for our public services! This is wonderful news. From 9am on Wednesday the church will be open as usual during the advertised services – we will of course continue to stream as we have been. Do make a special effort to come to the 10am Mass on Thursday morning where we will offer special prayers of Thanksgiving. 

Please do consider setting up Parish Giving which helps us more easily claim back tax from the Government. All you need to do is call 0333 002 1271 and quote our Parish Giving Code – 230 623 503.

Sunday Notices

Good endings.

There are some things we’ll happy to see the back of.

This is the final week of the Church’s liturgical calendar. We say goodbye to 2020 with the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. 

It’s a fairly new feast – put in place by Pope Pius XI in 1925 – to mark the final Sunday of the liturgical year. 

Pope Pius said that the most effective defence against the destructive forces of the age was the recognition of the kingship of Christ. He said that a feast celebrated by all on the same day every year is far better than any number of learned books or letters. 

First we do, then we understand.

If we’re honest I suspect we’re all fairly glad to see the back of this year. What a year it has been to be alive. But thankfully we have kept our focus on Christ – both in action and in word. 

We have been faithful to His call in our life and we have been dedicated in our service of others in His name. 

So this week, we must look back at what we have done and then turn to face what we know is coming – the joyous Good News in the birth of Jesus on the 25th December!

We can learn from the past year and use that knowledge to focus on what is coming. 

During Advent I will be sharing a number of reflections with you on the Lord’s Prayer. A prayer that pulls us through time right back to the feet of Jesus Christ Himself as he taught it to the disciples. 

Spend this week reflecting on the year past, those things that you could have been better at, those things that you have done well – and point them all to the kingship of Christ – all we do, and will do – is for Him.

Fr. Matthew

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Other Notices

Fr. Matthew is on retreat this week and there will be no public services at St. Anselm. You are encouraged to join with St. Mary’s, Kenton – our old friends – each day via their website, and St. Martin’s in Ruislip via their Facebook Page. 

Thank you all so much for your kindness in donating goods to the church larder. We have helped so many people in the past few weeks – including a mother with a newborn, a man just out of prison and other very desperate and vulnerable people. Your generosity is God’s Love in action in the world. Thank you. 

Please do consider setting up Parish Giving (automatic payment of your donation to St. Anselm) which helps us more easily claim back tax from the Government. All you need to do is call 0333 002 1271 and quote our Parish Giving Code – 230 623 503.

Small things.

Doing the small things makes an enormous difference.

Time and time again I find myself quietly reminding myself to do the small things. 

Perhaps it’s just my character – but I want to grab the world and change it – change it for good – for Jesus Christ and I want to do it all right now!

Of course, that’s utterly out of my reach (right now) but… big things are inevitably made up of small things. 

When I walk through Hayes and I see beggars and people struggling to make ends meet I want to solve all their problems. I want to pick them up, dust them off and set them on the right path. The reality is that people find themselves in difficulty on the streets for a variety of very complex reasons and my instinct to pick people up and dust them off can often do more harm than good. So, I remind myself to do the little things. 

I don’t throw my arms in the air in despair at the world, I don’t protest in Parliament Square, I don’t shout at those passing by ignoring the person in need. No, I sit next to them and talk, or perhaps I smile and ask their name. I ask if they’d like a warm drink or a warm meal. What is it they need right now? 

Then, through that first small act there’ll be another, and another and eventually something amazing will have happened. We’ll have achieved the impossible. 

During this lockdown we may often find ourselves wondering how we’ll get through it all. 

So… do the little things. Pray when you wake, pray when you go to bed. Say hello to Our Father whenever you pass the church or walk past the cross in your home. 

Do the small things, and the big things will surprise you.

Fr. Matthew

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Other notices

The church is open everyday (except Saturday). The church will be open for Private Prayer for an hour after each streamed service. Jesus Christ will be present in the Blessed Sacrament on the Altar. Come and find peace and calm as we face lockdown together.  The foodbank and tutoring classes continue as usual on Wednesday & Fridays. 

Parish Giving Code – 230 623 503.
Call  – 0333 002 1271. 

This week will be very different for most of us. There are lots of changes to the way we do things – but there is alway continuity in prayer. That is where we must focus our minds in the coming weeks. Praying for ourselves, for each other and for the world at large.

We will be praying on Sunday for those who made the ultimate act of sacrifice for us in war. An Act of Remembrance will stream on Sunday at 10:45am after our live streamed Parish Mass.

Spiritual Communion.

Receiving Christ in your heart.

Whilst we are separated from receiving the Sacrament in the Mass we are not cut off completely. 

There is an ancient tradition in the Church of receiving Holy Communion via a Spiritual Communion. 

St. Thomas Aquinas says that in order to make a Spiritual Communion we should have,

‘an ardent desire to receive Jesus in the Holy Sacrament and a loving embrace as though we had already received Him’.

You can make your Spiritual Common as often as you like but I encourage you to make it each morning at about 9:30am – the moment when I will be elevating the Host in church at the Daily Mass.

In this way we will be offering our prayers together, holding together through this difficult time.

To make your Spiritual Communion pray:

‘My Jesus, I believe that you are in the Blessed Sacrament. I love you above all things, and I long for you in my soul. 

Since I cannot now receive you sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. As though you have already come, I embrace you and unite myself entirely to you; never permit me to be separated from you. Amen.’

Fr. Matthew

Downloads

Other notices

The church is open everyday (except Saturday). The church will be open for Private Prayer for an hour after each streamed service. Jesus Christ will be present in the Blessed Sacrament on the Altar. Come and find peace and calm as we face lockdown together. 

Parish Giving Code – 230 623 503.
Call  – 0333 002 1271.