Journey's End : Easter Day 2012

On Easter Sunday morning the church was full (over 230 of us!) for the splendid Sung Eucharist.
Numbers were swollen by three baptism parties: no Easter54 bonnets, but some eye-catching fashions on were on show!
The sanctuary party processed round the church to the blessing of the Easter garden.
The font was then the focus of all eyes as three well-behaved infants were duly baptised, then blessed at the altar
After the incense and the offertory, the children of the junior church (with military escort!)showed off their new easter bonnets.
Reader Fred Nye, 75 on Good Friday, marked his official retirement from his ministry with a gift and prolonged applause.
Then after the service, there was much celebration over drinks of various sorts, while a baby posed atop the font (now with its cover on!)

Easter is of course far from over. That evening the choir performed at their best at Festal Evensong, and the Church will continue
to give thanks and praise as the Great Forty Days from Easter to Ascension unfold.























Text, photos and poem|: Chris Price

Resurrection

 

At this season, more than any other,

They step forward from the darkness,

Thronging the margins of the mind.

Silently they rise up from the grave of memory:

Some who have left their mark on this place and on us:

Long-past worshippers congregating again,

A parent mourned, a friend lost to the dark;

Others known only to their God:

Taken in their multitudes before their time

By man’s inhumanity to man.

Their faces haunt us, their presence as real

As the heavy clustered lilies given in their memory,

Before they slip away into the shadows,

Back to the borders of oblivion.

But their death is only a beginning

And our lamenting will have an end

In the certain hope of the resurrection,

The new fire, the fanfare of faith,

When the past and the present come once more together

And all things are made whole again in God.

 

Surely ...

 

Easter, 1995

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