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Announcement for church members: the harvest
lunch scheduled for 15/10 has been postponed until
29/10/06.
Welcome
to our website
We hope
that you will enjoy looking around, and will come back often, as the
site is updated every week. Our aim is to capture the
spirit of St. Andrew's Church online - our faith, our worship,
our people, and our community.
Our
church is first of all a spiritual centre, a place where people can
find God, be nourished in their spiritual journey, and grow in their
life of faith. If you could come along to one of our services your
presence would be a joy to us and to God.
If you
have any questions or suggestions please do contact us using
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details there, including access to a location map. We also love to
know a little more about our web guests, and would really appreciate
it if you could take a moment to sign our Visitors'
Book.
Again,
welcome and thanks for visiting our site.
Featured on our
website this week:
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"A sublime piece
full of gentle,
uplifting hope for
mankind". |
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Amici to sing the
Fauré Requiem
at St.
Andrew's - 2/11/06
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Hot Topics
-
NEW BISHOP OF
TAUNTON
ANNOUNCED
2/10/06 |
News from St.
Andrew's
Director of Music
Alan
to become a
hoodie!
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Colour Supplement -
A letter for
harvest
from our Vicar
Revd. Julian
Smith |
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Colour Supplement -
The beginning and the
end of wisdom
by Gordon Atkinson |
Colour Supplement -
One step closer to
paradise-
by Brian
Draper
of
LICC |
News from St
Andrew's-
An invitation to
'Encountering
Advent '
with Alan Cook
of St. Andrew's
Church |
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See previous weeks'
editions of our Colour Supplement
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See previous weeks'
editions of our
Homepage |
Goodbye to buried treasures (for
now)
Have you ever noticed how the things that you really enjoy in
life can sometimes get displaced by the humdrum? So it is for me
with allotment gardening. After a number of happy years cultivating
my own vegetables, and quite a lot of agonising over reaching the
decision, I have finally informed our allotment secretary that next
year I will not be continuing with my plot. Life seems too busy
and full of demands at the moment. Maybe, in the future, I can go
back to it, but for now it has become a stress rather than a
pleasure - just another thing to do.
The last year I have not spent a lot of time on the
plot. It is hard to say why – maybe it is genuinely a
lack of time, or more likely, other distractions have combined with
a general lethargy to create a sort of horticultural
stagnation. Plentiful weeds testify that the time and
commitment necessary to make the allotment look beautiful (and
believe me, a well-tended plot of vegetables is a beautiful
sight) have been sadly lacking.
Yet when I have made the effort to go gardening I come
back feeling mentally and spiritually refreshed, and committed to
simplify my lifestyle. There is a feeling of gratitude arising
from pushing a fork into the earth and revealing a clutch of small
white potatoes. This simple discovery never ceases to evoke
surprise and delight. Even the pleasure, an hour later, of eating
them for supper does not top that moment of discovering those buried
treasures.
Perhaps one of the most surprising things about my allotment
is the way it rewards what small efforts I do made.
Fruits and vegetables grow despite my armchair approach to
gardening. This year I have harvested runner beans, French
beans, courgettes (fry them lightly in a little olive oil with
chopped fresh mint), carrots (what a different vegetable that
is to the supermarket variety), raspberries, strawberries, lettuce
leaves, leeks, swedes, chillies and of course, those potatoes.
It is a humbling thought that these things just keep growing despite
my neglect of them.
So this is the
last year, for a while anyway, that I shall be taking home grown
produce to our harvest festival. I am very grateful for my small
plot, which has given me an appreciation of the seasons, and an
understanding of the challenges of gardening. It has also
given me a new respect for those who earn their livings by growing
our food. I am only too aware that if my crops fail, whilst I
may suffer disappointment, I can simply head for Sainsbury's.
If a farmer loses his crops, he loses his livelihood as
well.
So
despite my hope that that giving up my plot is the right thing to do
at this time, I do feel a bit bereft. I have said that I often
feel more attuned to the ‘spiritual bit’ of myself on the plot that
I do in church. The thought that has been in my mind during my
infrequent visits to the plot this season has been that our
spiritual lives, just like those vegetables, continue be nourished
by God even when we are not paying them as much attention as we
could or should. And when we do rather hesitantly open the
gate and risk a look, we find to our surprise and gratitude that
growth has taken place. For me, that’s the Grace of God in
action. We reap a harvest far richer than our own efforts
deserve.
With blessings
from all of us at St. Andrew's.
Adrian
Webmaster
NOTE: I am the webmaster of St. Andrew's
Church, not clergy or a reader. I write as 'a man in a pew'
and so you should not assume that I necessarily know what I'm
talking about, or that what I say reflects the views of other people
in our church. To read previous
weeks' FWIWs please click here.
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