The Welland-Fosse Benefice: Prayers and Notices.

 Sunday 4^th October 2020:  Trinity XVII

 

• Please remember in your prayers those who are sick: Janette Saunders, Barry Broughton, Ann Hensby, Graham Robinson, Belinda Forbes and Derek Barker.
• Zoom services continue throughout the week, including today, 11am (via wellandfossebenefice@gmail.com). From 16 October, Zoom Morning Prayer will be limited to Mondays and Wednesdays at 8.30am. From the same date, Compline will be suspended until Advent when it will be held on Sundays at 6pm starting 29^th
• Today we continue our gradual return to church with worship at Duddington, 9.30am (Holy Communion), followed by the Zoom service at 11am. Next week, worship is at South Luffenham (Harvest) at 11am, including the Zoom Service.
• We shall celebrate Harvest Festival next week on Zoom (11am) with the good folk of South Luffenham. Please bring with you to the Zoom Service some element of your own harvest to show to us all: our longest runner bean, a jar of dahlias, a bottle of home-made wine, your most recent poem or sketch?

 

SOUTH LUFFENHAM:

There will be a service in Church at 11am on Sunday 11th October with a harvest theme. Janet has kindly made some jams and pickles which will be available at the back of Church – donations to Church funds (so remember to bring your purse!).  Immediately after the service on 11th October will be our AGMs. We are looking for new members of the PCC. After many years of faithful service as our secretary Alan is heading off to pastures new so we need a new secretary. If you think you could help please get in touch – sally@saltlane.com.

 

This Week’s Meditation:    Daddy Long-Legs

You won’t have failed to notice the huge increase in Daddy long-Legs during this summer and autumn. Tipula Paludosa are very common this year due to the warm summer, we are told. They are not dangerous. They tickle our faces when we least expect it. They play an important part in the food-chain by eating some smaller undesirable pests and offer themselves for food to the birds. We don’t much like them in the house but it’s very difficult to keep them out.

 

They remind us – in their irritating way – that we too are part of the natural world and indeed one of its worst predators. With this pandemic which we are enduring has come the realization that our relationship with nature has been violated – by us, – if the source of the virus is to be found in the wet markets of Wuhan.  Humankind seems to have gone overboard with the Genesis command to have ‘dominion’ over the sea, the air, the cattle and all living creatures.  We have interpreted our dominion in terms of power: to rule, tread (as in a wine press), trample or stamp. Even our gardens, beautiful as they may be, now seem to be an extension of the house: sanitized at every point.  No wonder we have seen off those species which traditionally belonged to our homes: the barn owl, the house martin, the hedge sparrow.

 

Surely we can exercise a stewardship of nature in a more sympathetic way? Perhaps one of the positive things to come out of this pandemic is to re-value nature and our part in it. There is a big agenda here for those who worship the Lord of Creation.  Perhaps we in the 21st century will pay homage to St. Francis in quite a different and more practical way to those who idolized him in the 19^th century.

See wellandfosse.org for much more information, including contact details for The Very Rev Christopher Armstrong and the churchwardens