Dear Friends,
Thank you, as always, for your continued love, support and prayers – it means a great deal to us. This Autumn we have been welcoming many guests, and this week we have had a Creation themed Half Term, working with A Rocha UK (one of our partners), and we are very glad to have welcomed 28 young people with their parents and carers.
We have also welcomed some new Community members: Martha (UK), Paul (Pakistan), Richard (UK), James (UK). We could still do with another 4 or 5 members of community so please keep praying, and on our website you will find the latest vacancies – we are particularly looking for someone to lead our Estate Team, beginning in the early new year.
Our new programme taking us up to the end of Summer 2025, which has been delayed for a number of reasons, will be going live (we hope) on Monday 18th November. (When it comes to make booking requests for events please do so via the programme event pages on the website).
We also have a new prayer diary covering November 2024 to April 2025, available now. Thank you for your ongoing prayers for the life of Scargill and our guests.
See below Di’s latest reflection- Enjoy!
Diane writes:
Lord we come before you
in anticipation of what you bring us today.
Help us to wait for you
creatively, expectantly and courageously,
To honour you
With our time, love and imagination.
May we engage in the pursuit of you
wholeheartedly, unreservedly, tremendously.
(From ‘We Welcome You’, one of our morning prayer liturgies adapted by James Cathcart.)
Here is a prayer that describes a relationship that is alive with expectation and participation. Here is a prayer that recognises God wants a relationship with us that is open and honest, full of anticipation and hope. Here is a prayer that ignites faith in a God who is able to, and wants to work in us and through us. Here is a prayer that encourages me to pray.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Ordination and Consecration of a great friend of mine to be a Bishop. It was a very grand affair made even more so because as I had been asked to help with communion. I was allocated a seat in the front row – How about that! Throughout the service I was looking for a little nugget to use in this reflection and had to wait until page 32 (!) when we were led into The Lord’s Prayer with these words:
‘Let us pray with confidence as our Saviour has taught us, each praying in the language of our hearts.’
Now I have heard these words many times but this time the words confidence and language of our hearts jumped out at me and I realised I had again been invited to have the confidence to pray confidently from my heart, to engage with Our Father ‘wholeheartedly, unreservedly, tremendously’.
To find a painting that encompassed all this seemed nigh impossible. There was an abundance of despondent, earnest, solemn, intense, devout, sincere pray-ers. I didn’t want gay abandon but I did want energy, excitement, expectation and eventually I found Pietro del Po’s etching from around 1650 of The Canaanite (or Syrophoenician) Woman asking Christ to cure her daughter, which seems to me to display them all.
Here is a woman not cowered by her status or ethnicity. I believe she is proud to be a Syrophoenician woman and a mother. Driven by a deep love for her daughter with an intuitive perception of a greater truth, she has allowed herself to display not only humility in her words and actions before Jesus, but also the power of persistent faith.
This beautiful woman has become an icon of faith. There is also a humble confidence as she kneels low before Jesus, as she challenges his answers, as she waits refusing to waver in her faith and hope for Christ’s response. She perseveres, she is humble, the boldness in her never wavering but strengthened by her faith and hope in Christ and in her love for her child.
Today let us awaken within each of us a desire to pray courageously from the heart, maybe we can start with James Cathcart’s opening prayer using the slight adaptation below.
Lord I come before you
in anticipation of what you bring us today.
Help me to wait for you
creatively, expectantly and courageously.
To honour you
With my time, love and imagination.
May I engage in the pursuit of you
wholeheartedly, unreservedly, tremendously.
Amen.
With love and prayers from Phil, Di and the Scargill Community