The Green Chalice by Mark Coleman

I visited an older member of one of the parishes recently. Widowed for many years she sat there with her TV times nearby. We had a good chat, remembering family, church, the changes in the town. We laughed and prayed. She said she would love to come back to Church, and she so appreciated people kindly keeping in touch. She was very very lonely. Loneliness is the theme of an article by George Monbio t. He talks about the age we now live in - the Digital Age - and says it says plenty about our artefacts but little about society. We are social creatures and we need each other. Mammals are shaped by contact with others and we need each other, we are inter-dependent. This we have been reminded off wonderfully in our harvest festivals when we looked at a piece of fruit and thought about the dozens of people that had been involved in growing, picking, transporting, and selling it to us. And all the bugs and bees and sun and rain that helped it grow. We depend on so much, from God and from eac...

  Compassion We read so often in the Gospels that our Lord "had compassion". Jesus looks at people weeping and he has compassion. He sees the hungry, and he worries. He sees his friend's weeping and he weeps too. He suffers with them. Com as in companion, passion as in the passion that Jesus went through on his way to death on the cross. Being alongside others is what us ordinary folk trying to be good friends of Jesus do. When we enter into their sadness, and hopefully their joy sometimes too, we are like Christ, compassionate. So it's very simple to be a Christian. If we take compassion as the essence of what Jesus is to us today then it's no mystery how to be a follower of Jesus. It's simply about compassion, sharing others' pain, standing alongside the poor, the grieving, the sick, the mistreated.   Music and liturgy are for me the great ways we reconnect with compassion. Music touches the heart and the mind and when the words are good they move u...