Tag: lent

Women of Holy Week

bible, church resources, easter, holy week, lent, pictures, worship

Last year I worked on a project with the fabulous Paula Gooder to illustrate her nine short stories entitled ‘Women of Holy Week’. The resulting book was hugley popular last Lent, and I suspect it will be again this year, so it’s absolutely not too late to get hold of copies and use them in your church or in your personal devotions, or as a gift for friends. It’s wonderfully readable, and includes ideas for reflection as well as historical / scriptural details drawn from Paula’s scholarly wisdom that really enrich the narrative.

Buy the book here (links to Church House Publishing)

If you would like to use the images alongside the book in worship or Lent groups etc, you can download them from my book illustrations page. There are nine individual paintings, and one large composite image, to be ‘read’ in a spiral direction starting at the top left hand corner, following the order that the stories appear in Paula’s book. Because the stories are all interwoven with each other, so are the paintings – you can enjoy them separately or together.

NB if you don’t have the means to do high quality colour printing you may find projecting the images more satisfying.

Ash Wednesday and Lent

art, ash wednesday, church resources, clipart, hymns, lent

Some stuff here – help yourselves 🙂

Lent sonnet

These forty days of prayer and discipline
are given for us to slowly grow in grace
and learn to be your people once again,
to find our truest home in your embrace.
In pilgrimage, through hours and days and weeks
of changing who we are and what we do,
the human heart may find that which it seeks:
ourselves, once restless, find their rest in you,
our mother hen, whose chicks at last come home
to find the safest place where they may cling;
we need not face the wilderness alone,
but nestle in shadow of your wing.
Oh, forty days of learning how to be
what you have promised us eternally.

Ash Wednesday hymn (tune: Picardy) – slightly revised

Dust to dust, we mark our repentance,
entering a guilty plea,
Ash to ash, we face our sentence,
Sin writ large for all to see:
Now these signs of all our falls from grace,
mark us for divine embrace.

Dust of earth once shaped and moulded
into this, our human frame,
Body, mind and soul enfolded,
given life and called by name.
Now O Lord remake our damaged form,
Hold us till our hearts grow warm.

Dust that fuels the lights of heaven,
Stars and planets passing by,
Atoms of creation’s splendour,
Earth to earth and sky to sky,
Now our dust, redeemed, sings loud and long
in that universal song.

Lent hymn / song (tune: slane)
the ten commandments verse can be omitted if that’s not your focus

Lord of our life, our beginning and end,
Our Father, our shepherd, our Saviour and friend,
We look to your teaching in each fresh new day
To lead us and guide us and show us your way.

Ten laws to teach us to live in your love,
Ten ways to make earth more like heaven above,
Ten rules to inspire all we think, say and do,
To help us be faithful in following you.

You are our safety, our great mother hen,
Whenever we wander you call us again,
We’ll always be drawn to your loving embrace
To nestle beneath the soft wings of your grace.

This is our story, and this is our song:
For we are your people, to you we belong,
Wherever life takes us, in all that we do,
Our hearts will find peace when we’re resting in you.

Lent hymn

hymns, lent, Other cool stuff, worship

Written for Helen and her churches. Tune is Slane. 

Lord of our life, our beginning and end,
Our Father, our shepherd, our Saviour and friend,
We look to your teaching in each fresh new day
To lead us and guide us and show us your way.

Ten laws to teach us to live in your love,
Ten ways to make earth more like heaven above,
Ten rules to inspire all we think, say and do,
To help us be faithful in following you.

You are our safety, our great mother hen,
Whenever we wander you call us again,
We’ll always be drawn to your loving embrace
To nestle beneath the soft wings of your grace.

This is our story, and this is our song:
For we are your people, to you we belong,
Wherever life takes us, in all that we do,
Our hearts will find peace when we’re resting in you.

 

 

Stations of the Cross

holy week, lent, pictures

If you haven’t already seen it, take a look at this, the website for the Cambridge Stations. And better still, if you can, go along in person to any or all of the installations and artworks that have been specially commissioned as part of this pop-up reflective project for Lent.  The tradition of following the stations of the cross derives from the still earlier tradition of pilgrimage, especially pilgrimage to the Holy Land, in which pilgrims would seek literally to walk in the footsteps of Christ.  For those unable to make what was a long and arduous journey, the Stations provided a way to make a ‘virtual pilgrimage’.

The pattern of the Stations familiar to many of us contains not only events in the passion of Christ taken directly from scripture, but also some from tradition, such as Jesus’ encounter with Veronica, who wipes his face with a cloth on which he leaves the imprint of his face, a ‘vero icon’ – a true image – of Jesus. The Stations used for this project are those found in the gospels themselves, and on the Cambridge Stations website each short passage of scripture is provided for your own reflections. Some of the artists have also provided further thoughts that can be read alongside seeing the artwork itself in situ.

My own church is too far off the beaten track to be part of the Stations route, so I was allocated St Botolph’s Church, right in the centre of town as a venue, and Station 13: Jesus dies, as my title. Here’s what I did (right).

As soon as I started looking at this crucial part of the story of Jesus’ passion I was drawn to the image of the temple curtain being torn in two, coupled with the earthquake that split the rocks (in Luke and Matthew’s account). I decided I wanted to experiment with ripping the actual canvas on which I was painting.

The second thing that occurred to me was how, in icon writing, the gold leaf is applied first, and is allowed to shine through the halo of the depicted saint – it is a glimpse of the always-present reality of the kingdom of God, breaking through into the material world. I decided to honour this by using gold leaf to line the tear in the canvas, and on a board behind the tear. At the moment of Christ’s death – the moment of darkness and desolation – the kingdom of heaven was near. How else could the Centurion proclaim that, ‘Surely, this man was the Son of God’?

Finally, having decided on gold leaf, I came across the Japanese tradition of ‘Kintsugi’ – mending broken pottery with gold, so that the wounds in the pottery become shining scars, and the mended vessel becomes more beautiful than when it was first made.  It struck me that the gold leaf lining the tear in the canvas, in the temple curtain, in the very fabric of reality, is a way of affirming the wholeness and healing that was possible through the suffering and death of Christ. The risen Jesus still bears the scars from his passion, but they are signs of hope and wholeness – following the iconographic pattern of this painting, the broken skin would be healed with gold. And just as Thomas did when he met the risen Christ, you can actually place your finger into the tear in the canvas and feel the rough edges.

Please excuse the quality of the photograph – it is rather blurred, while the actual painting is rather more crisp and vibrant!  If you can, pop along to St Botolphs and see it for yourself, and why not go and visit all 14 stations?

 

 

 

 

A little pre-Lent ramble

lent, sermon

Today’s reading at the morning Eucharist was Mark 7.1-13.

I can’t think of an instance in the gospels when the Pharisees would have come away from a conversation with Jesus thinking, ‘That went well, I think we really convinced him this time.’  And they try so hard, so very hard, to get it right, and they always miss what’s right in front of them.

Today, this reading comes across not as a last Alleluia before the fast begins, but perhaps more as a comment on Lent itself and how we keep it.  It reminds us that the whole point of the law when it was given was to give another way, alongside all the many other gifts and self-revelations of God through the centuries, for us to ‘learn to be God’s people once again.’

It invites us to think about how whatever Lenten discipline we’ve chosen to undertake is going to help us draw closer to God – and warns us against anything that might inadvertently become an end in itself and so drive a wedge between us and God.

It took the ancient Israelites 40 years – a whole lifetime – to learn to be God’s people, and they still kept getting it wrong, just as we do. The law that was given to them during this time at Sinai was supposed to help, but in every generation since, God’s people have done as the gospel’s Pharisees tend to do, and made the law into a thing in itself, rather than as a way of learning to be People of God. All that time in the wilderness, trying to work out how to do it right, and all along, through the visceral and dramatic pillars of fire and cloud, and through the daily gift of manna from heaven, God was right there with them, inviting his beloved children to trust him, to draw up a chair at his table, sit and eat.

The poor Pharisees in the gospel reading are in a similar boat. They try so hard to get it right, and all the time they’re missing what’s right in front of them: Jesus’ friends, with their unwashed hands, are drawing up a chair every day and sitting down to eat with God.  I pray that when the last judgement comes, all who tried so hard, yet missed the point, will be confronted with the raw love and generosity and hospitality of God that says, ‘Sit, and eat’, and finally reply, ‘Thank you, I’d love to’.

This Lent, I pray that whatever we ‘do’ may be a way to draw closer, to become God’s people once again, whether that process takes 40 days or 40 years. I pray that it will be a time when we can hear God’s invitation and respond by drawing our chair closer – in worship, work, leisure, and rest – and enjoy table fellowship with our Lord.