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How to be wise.

Epiphany.

On Wednesday we celebrate Epiphany. The moment when the Wise Men arrived in Bethlehem to greet Jesus, Joseph and Mary. 

I will be out and about in the parish blessing houses and marking them with chalk 20+C+M+B+21 as a special sign that this house is blessed. C – M – B are the initials of the Wise Men – Casper, Melchior, and Balthasar – there is much tradition and legend about these men who ‘followed the science’ (the star) and found their way to a stable in Bethlehem to pay honour to the Saviour of the World. 

I love this tradition because it gives us an opportunity to remember that our own homes are a special place of care, love, devotion and faith in which we grow the faith of those around us. 

We don’t have to be wise in the faith to be able to share it. We have to be child-like in our faith – we must have a child-like delight in sharing the joy, the love, and our excitement of being part
of it. 

We can so easily get caught up in worrying about being wise that we forget that sometimes the greatest epiphany moments are given to us by children and their delight in Christmas and the birth of Jesus Christ.

If you would like your house blessed this year, drop me an email or call before Wednesday.

Fr. Matthew

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Please note the new time of Daily Prayer & Mass – we’re trying this new time until Easter.

If you would like your house blessed on Epiphany (6th Jan) please call Fr. Matthew to arrange a time.  

Please keep hold of your stamps for the RNIB Christmas Campaign, a box will soon appear in church.

A big thank you to our new sound and vision volunteers who had their training last Friday and take the helm on Sunday 3rd Jan! 

You can now donate online via PayPal (click ‘giving’ on our website). This is a great way to give a one-off gift and helps us claim the Gift Aid. 

Don’t forget to consider setting up regular giving with the Parish Giving Scheme. Call 0333 002 1271 with your bank details to hand and quote our Parish Code – 230 623 503

Happy New Year.

Turning over a new leaf.

When I was younger I remember thinking that we had to go our and find a leaf to turn over. I was irritated because I couldn’t write on the leaf and physically turn it over. So I made my own leaf and wrote on it all the things I was going to do that year.

I was going to be better behaved. I was going to stop ‘answering back’. I was going to be a better son. 

In many ways my behaviour in those years was born out of the fact my family was broken through divorce. I lived out the reality of hurt and pain that for years coloured my understanding of what a family was supposed to be. 

When people talked abut the perfect family I would laugh at them, “there’s no such thing”. Even though I went to chapel every week nobody ever told me we had the perfect model of  family before us all the time – The Holy Family. 

A model of motherly love, of fatherly sacrifice, of a family who held together in the darkness and for whom God (quite literally!) was a the centre of all things.

Our families are all different. They are broken in many ways, they are big and small, over the top, quiet, difficult, fun. Loud, noisy, difficult, quiet.  The Holy Family experienced all of these things and endured them. 

Sometimes that is what we must do as well. Endure. Be obedient and open to what God is calling us to do in our families and make sure above all things God is right in the heart of them. 

It doesn’t matter that we don’t always get it right, what matters is that God is there in the middle of it all. 

Then, when things do go wrong, there’s a chance that something beautiful may come out of it. 

Fr. Matthew

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We are starting to run low of things in the Church Larder. We are in particular need of toothpaste and toothbrushes (individually wrapped please). We also need small packs of tea-bags and sugar and long-life milk.  

Please keep hold of your stamps for the RNIB Christmas Campaign, a box will soon appear in church.

For those watching online. I’m sorry for the recent sound issues. These were caused by a glitch in the Bluetooth Receiver and the way it was processing the music. I’ve now fixed it and the short periods of interference that impacted Christmas Day and Boxing Day should now be resolved. 

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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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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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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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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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.