Church Retreat

Hello again. I'm recently home from a church retreat in Aylesford. We had a wonderful time at The Friars, the home of a Carmelite monastic order. The beautiful buildings date back to the Middle Ages in a very quiet and contemplative setting.

The theme of the weekend, led by Wayne and Lois (Mennonite Mission Network pastors who are part of our church community) was on relationships--within ourselves, with others, the world and the natural environment. One of the highlights for me was the creative expressions of community that we came up with on Saturday morning in groups. Some people created a board gae while others created a sculpture, wrote a poem or created a photo collage. My group created a song, based on the song, Ubi Caritas. In between repetitions of the theme, we sustained the E and wove other elements around it...a litany of some of the things that people have to learn to live with as community over some vocal percussion, and a Gregorian chant naming some of the ways that we experience and deal with conflict, and then a Bible passage read over the drone, interwoven with the Ubi Caritas theme.

I also quite enjoyed the Cabaret evening on Saturday night. We had a rich variety of acts, everything for musical acts to an excellently dramatic rendition of The Highwayman, to a game show (Call my Bluff, like Balderdash/Dictionary) , and lots of humourous acts too. One I remember is the song one person sang called There Were Ten, Ten Constipated Men in the Bible (to the tune of There were Beans, Beans Trying on some Jeans In the Corner Grocery Store).

For instance,

Noah...who for forty days passed only water

Moses...who took two tablets

Peter....who was a rock

Paul...who laboured for the Lord

Titus...whose name says it all

It was quite a funny song, which she learned for a warden, who learned it from a group of nuns.

Comedy aside, we had a lovely weekend for it. There had been predictions of rain, but we only saw about 5 minutes of rain total all weekend. Sue and I had a nice walk yesterday afternoon, and after returning from that, I led a group of people in a music jamming session. Lots of fun.

It was nice to spend time in a relaxing setting with friends from Wood Green. Now I'm beginning my week of half-term holidays...off to the Netherlands on Tuesday. I will blog after that again.

Auf wiedersehen.