VICAR'S LETTER
17
Sundon Road
Streatley
October 2008
Dear
All
Imagine the scene. You are sitting in church. The church is filled with fruit and flowers. At the front of the church, at opposite ends of the screen, stand the two pyramids of shelving that we sometimes use at Candlemas to hold tea-lights. At present their shelves are empty. Between them in the centre stands the small credence table. Behind it raises a screen. This is the setting for this year's Harvest Family Service and Uniform Parade. It is a service that has three main parts.
In the first part we say thank-you to God for the relative plenty that we enjoy. To mark this, the children and young people will be invited to bring forward their harvest gifts. Usually these are just stacked along the altar steps but this year instead they will be loaded onto the shelves of the left-hand pyramid. Assembled there they will form a tableau that speaks of the bounty that we all but take for granted.
In the second part of the service we learn something of the much less favoured conditions in which many of our fellow human beings are forced to live their lives. We place on the table a simple bowl of rice. Then on to the screen, Alison Briggs, a member of the Mercy Ships support team, will project pictures that tell us something of what they hope to do to bring relief to the peoples of Liberia. This is a country so poor and so dislocated by recent strife, that when the Mercy Ship docks it will provide the only hospital in the entire country.
In the third part of the service we will do our bit to help in this mission of mercy. The money raised through our harvest appeal will support the work of the medical volunteers involved, but there is also a need for far more basic things - bath towels, night-dresses (preferably blue, orange or green), sewing kits (needles, tape-measures, bobbins of thread), old towels for mopping, wash bags containing soap, toothpaste, and flannels, manual sewing machines. All the children will be invited to bring contributions for this collection. These are now brought to the front and placed on the shelves of the right-hand pyramid.
The service is now complete, and hopefully it will have given expression to the two motivations that drive this festival - to give thanks for the plenty that we enjoy and to do something to make the lives of those unimaginably less fortunate than ourselves a little better.
All best wishes,
Roger