Prayers for Montreal During a Pandemic
/Download Prayers for Montreal during a Pandemic HERE
Neil's Weekly Blog Post
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This is a painting I love very much. In many ways it is a restrained depiction of the Crucifixion. Mary the mother of Jesus looks on sorrowfully on one side, John the beloved disciple stands on the other. Jesus is not the idealized Redeemer of so many depictions but is a pitiable creature as his life ebbs away. But look at the figure at the foot of the cross and you will find the emotional power of this scene. She is the Magdelene. A composite figure she is both the scandalous woman and the Disciple who loved much. Here she is, her hair is loose, her face is turned away but her hands, thrust into the air, communicate the depth of sorrow that must surely be expressed in the tears flowing down her face and the cry of anguish coming from deep within. But it is also an act of abandon to the One she loved so much.
It is that abandon that I find myself thinking about now, in this Holy Week when we cannot physically meet together. Yet the story we remember and the truth that we honour takes us to the foot of the cross to place there our hearts: broken, sorrowful, overflowing with love.
At moments of abandon I find truth in the words of Psalm 73: Whom have I in heaven but you? A truth that is both awe inspiring and powerfully comforting. For the truth is that we have no one else but God. Surely this crisis brings us to our knees in the recognition of something so much bigger, so very much out of our control that we simply have nowhere to turn but to the Living God. Yet how comforting that is, because in holding onto Christ we have God and He is awesome. When Jesus gave his life on the Cross we saw how far God was prepared to go to stand in solidarity with us, to redeem us and save us for himself.
This Holy Week, let us then come before the Cross of Jesus and know that even in this time of peril we have somewhere to turn and someone to turn to. When all else falls away, we can throw up our hands in abandon and pray whom have I in heaven but you and find that God is enough.
Supper Club aka The Last Supper and final session of the 6 week Prayer Course
/Who would have imagined when Jenna Smith asked me if I wanted to offer The 24-7 Prayer Course with her during Lent that we would have been in in a global pandemic and in a period of social isolation and that our need to come together and pray would be this great?
Edward Yankie, Kenneth Wallace, Neil Mancor and I are collaborating to offer an experimental, improvisational, creative and prayerful digital gathering on Monday April 6th from 6-7:30. This will afford us an opportunity for conversation, reflection and a chance to be together in community in the “upper room” of Supper Club.
Bring your own supper and a cup of wine or juice!
Let me know if you have questions or need help logging onto zoom. Click this link to join
Also join the Facebook event and Facebook group to stay connected
Love,
Lee-Ann
Updated List of Digital Services including Palm Sunday in the Diocese of Montreal
/Download the newly updated list HERE
Updates from Dr. Eileen Scully and Jesse Zink's letter "Discerning the body: Eucharistic fasting and Covid-19"
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Excerpted from the letter (Read the full letter)
“Many people have noted that while we may be fasting from the Eucharist, we can still feast on the word. I agree! In the college community, we have turned our weekly service into an extended Bible study. Other communities are doing the same thing. Christian communities that may not have previously had regular Bible study are learning how transforming this can be. There are ample resources online to support this work and more coming all the time. May God’s word be a light to our feet and a lamp to our path in this time (Psalm 119:105).
This pandemic is calling us to an extended fast, a sort of “super Lent.” (The word “quarantine” literally means “40 days.”) May this time, like Lent itself, be holy to us and a blessing to the church so that we may bless a world so deeply in need.”
Jesse Zink
Canon Theologian, Diocese of Montreal
Live with Lee-Ann March 31st 2020 Special Covid-19 Edition
/On March 31st at 10 am on Live with Lee-Ann we will be addressing the technical aspects of video conferencing during a pandemic.
Bring your questions and comments and be a part of the conversation!
About our Guest:
Jen DeTracey is a marketing strategist, a certified solution-focused business coach, a published author, a professional speaker and one of Canada’s top marketing experts. Jen specializes in teaching customer engagement and customer retention.
90% of the work Jen does with clients and communities is done remotely through Zoom, YouTube, Facebook, Webinars and Online Training Programs. When she started working online, she knew very little about technology and was temped to throw keyboard across the room.
Neil's Latest Blog entry in response to the Pandemic
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Love III
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.
"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.
-George Herbert
I love George Herbert’s poem Love III with its intimate and loving dialogue between God and the Soul over a meal. There are multiple images of meals in the Scriptures to which this alludes. The Song of Solomon goes “He brought me to His banqueting table and His banner over me is love.” Or the Psalmist prays with such hope: You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You have anointed my head with oil; My cup overflows. Or that tender moment in Revelation Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me. It is beautiful to think that this is all that God really wants to do. To set a table for us. To dine with us and share a meal. What holy conversation that would be.
I think it was the turkey dinner that tipped me off. Starting out this odyssey of staying in place, baking a few cookies seemed like a reasonable thing to do. With young adult children hanging around who like to graze, I made up some peanut butter oatmeal cookies. Then some blueberry muffins. After that I thought a banana cake might be a good idea. Of course who can be without buttermilk biscuits? Then a strawberry cake made with almond flour. This was an experiment that succeeded (thank you for your guidance Bishop Mary!).
Of course dinners need to be made and so on until last weekend I graduated to cooking a whole Turkey dinner with all the works. Then I realized: I am stress cooking. In my house we had all become accustomed to going our different ways and suddenly now we are thrown into this situation of being together all the time. Perhaps it’s a way of trying to assert some kind of control in a very out-of-control situation. To create something, affect something, anything.
Or perhaps it’s a way of participating in the holy.
Because in the middle of it all I remember. I remember sitting with two children in highchairs feeding them. I remember the struggle of getting children to eat but also the joy. It has always been a joy to watch my kids eating. I always loved it when their friends came over and ate. Young children don’t really question where food comes from they simply receive it. Gathering people around a table and nourishing them and sharing life over a shared meal is a beautiful thing to do. We do that at Supper Club – there is always just about enough. Now that my kids are young adults I don’t see them quite so often, at least until now, but I love it when they gather in our kitchen and talk and laugh (loudly) and eat in the place they still call home.
We are unable to share in that sacred meal, the Eucharist, but we can see and receive the Sacred in the meals we share in this time when we are forced into an unusual cohabitation. And if I can see the Sacred in those around my table and take joy in nourishing them, then at the very least I am finding God in this time. Finding in gracious hospitality the same invitation God extends to us all. Perhaps I don’t have to question where it all comes from but simply receive from the God who takes joy in being with us and who longs to dine with us.
And that Turkey turned out to be a great idea. We’re still eating the leftovers.
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
So I did sit, and eat.
Neil Mancor's 2nd Blog entry in response to the Pandemic
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Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. William Shakespeare, Macbeth
“There is a time for everything,” writes the Sage,“ and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die”. Countless times I have used these words at funerals to convey a sense of God in the whole of life from the beginning to its end. But these words do not seem right for the time we find ourselves in now. Lives being cut short before their time, so much of the world coming to a standstill. There is a time for everything – but not this, not now.
Time is hanging very differently these days. Until recently my days were neatly divided up into different compartments all designed to keep time moving quickly: get up, get ready, take the train, go to work, go to the gym, back to work, home, go out again. Every day the routine was repeated the time would be filled. Until now. Until this time. I don’t know what to do with this time, this moment we are in. Time came crashing in for me over the weekend but especially on Monday last week. I still went into work as usual, still clinging to the old time. Then it shifted. I came home with a large bag of everything I would need for a prolonged stay at home. I even tidied up my desk and as I closed the door to my office I stepped into this time. Now moves with a different rhythm for us all.
Have you ever noticed how time is so often viewed as a commodity to be spent wisely and invested appropriately as if it were a financial transaction? It even has a morality of its own: we certainly do not want to waste time as if it were a precious metal or something. After all time flies. The key to time is not spending it but investing it wrote Stephen R. Covey. I really admire Stephen Covey and this sounds like great advice but right now it just feels exhausting to imagine having to invest time all the…time. Better to have a cup of tea. There is a lot of wisdom in cups of tea.
Or time is like a living twitching being which can be slayed like a dragon. After all, we’re just killing time, we say when we are doing nothing much. I imagine time lying at my feet twitching in its death throes having been vanquished at last. Yet in fact surely it is time that is the vanquisher, pulling me along in its wake. I do not quite know what to do in this time where so much is happening and nothing at all – at the same time.
One friend suggested helpfully: maybe this is the end times. I don’t even want to go there.
I should use this time well. I should take the extra time that has opened up to improve my French, do some chores around the house. I should pray and draw closer to God in this time. Theological students love discovering the Kairos sense of time in the Scriptures. This moment now. The ordained moment. Here it is: a time God has given us. But I refuse to see this as an instrument God has engineered for me to pay attention or improve my spiritual life or become a better person or for us as a species to wake up and realize we need to go back to Church. This time is not about me or you but about us all as a species in peril.
We have been pitched into an unending present moment. We cannot see when it will end and normal time will reassert itself and we will all go back to the way it was. But we won’t go back to the way it was because life can never be the same again and after all, time waits for no one. There is no time there is only now. Right now people are dying and others are sick. Right now others are losing their jobs and many are scared. Right now I am trying to find the words to pray but find only silence.
But perhaps what the Scriptures do help us do is put this time in the context of God’s vast eternalness. For there is a time for everything under heaven. And God is in it all. It it is God who can hold this time in His eternal changelessness and maybe that can help me move from the time that was and enter what is with a measure of grace. After all, there’s no better time than the present!
Neil’s Digital Calendar – in Response to the Pandemic
Monday Weekly Blog Post published on website / social media
Tuesday 11am “Neil’s Let’s Talk” via Zoom All Welcome
Tuesday 7pm Compline on FB Live
Thursday 7pm Revive Group via Zoom Closed Group
Friday 10am “Clergy Connect” via Zoom Diocese of Montreal Clergy Blog Discussion / peer support
Sunday 7pm Compline on FB Live All Welcome
