New and Events for the week beginning January 30th

Please note: No Sunday School until Feb 27th. Please join us for Coffee in the Hall.

Please join us this evening at 6:00PM in St Andrew’s in Deal for Solemn Evensong and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament to conclude our Candlemass celebrations. Today the Crib is removed after Mass and Christmastide ends.

Today we celebrate the moment when Jesus was presented in the Temple. Simeon’s prophecy over the baby is a profound and disturbing word about the way Jesus exposes the truth of our hearts. It calls us to reflection, repentance and a commitment to a whole new way of being.

It is only a couple of weeks ago that we heard about the story of Samuel hearing the voice of God. The story included the phrase the lamp of God had not yet gone out. I think that Simeon and Anna in their seeking after God, were keeping the lamp of God alight in their day. We too in our own generation are called to keep the lamp of God alight, and to keep the good news of Jesus fresh, and to rely upon and be resourced by the Holy Spirit. Our calling is to act as God would have us act and to speak as God wants us to speak.

Mass today begins in the Hall for the Candlemas Ceremonies.

An Invitation to the Congregation. Fr Paul and Maggie invite you to join with them on the occasion of their 25th Wedding Anniversary for a Special Mass and Renewal of Vows at here at Holy Trinity on Saturday March 5th at 11:00AM followed by Drinks. The celebrant and preacher will be Canon Paul Seaman, Rector of Pulbrough, West Sussex. Fr Paul and Maggie would be grateful if you could let them know if you are attending for catering purposes. No Gifts please!

Lent begins on March 2nd Ash Wednesday. Sung Mass here at Holy Trinity in Ramsgate at 7:00pm with Imposition of Ashes and the joint choirs of Holy Trinity and St Andrew’s will sing the Mass along with the famous Allegri “Miserere”. Confessions can be heard at any time by appointment before Ash Wednesday or during Lent.

Our joint Lent course for both parishes will take place at St Andrew’s using the hall on Thursday evenings at 6:30PM beginning on March 10th. This course is entitled “Finding God at the Movies” and will see the screening of some very powerful films that have a deep theological message.

Week One: The Way. When his son dies during a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, a father decides to honour him by finishing the journey.

Week Two: The End of the Affair. Neil Jordan’s remake of the 1955 movie is full of Graham Greene’s “tortured Catholic” theology. Visually it is a throwback to those lush British romances of the 1940s, in green-tinged Technicolor

Week Three: Shadowlands. Thanks to brilliant performances from Debra Winger and especially Anthony Hopkins, Shadowlands is a deeply moving portrait of British scholar and theologian C.S. Lewis’s romance with American poet Joy Gresham.

Week four: Winter Light. In this film Ingmar Bergman explores the search for redemption in a meaningless existence. In this stark depiction of spiritual crisis, a small-town pastor performs his duties mechanically before a dwindling congregation. When he is asked to assist with a troubled parishioner’s debilitating fear of nuclear annihilation, he is terrified to find that he can provide nothing but his own uncertainty. Winter Light is an unsettling look at the human craving for personal validation in a world seemingly abandoned by God.

Week Five: Chocolat. God has a gloriously inventive imagination and a love of diversity. One of the greatest challenges facing followers of the world’s religions in the twenty-first century is to learn to respect the differences we find in one another and not to view them as threats to ourselves.

Bishop Norman invites you to join him and his priests in Canterbury Cathedral on Tuesday April 12th for the Chrism Mass. At Noon. The Chrism Mass is celebrated by the Bishop and concelebrated with all his priests. It is the Mass when the bishop consecrates the holy chrism and blesses the oil of catechumens and the oil of the sick. Priests are brought together and concelebrate this Mass as witnesses and sharers with their bishop in the consecration of the chrism because they share in the office of the bishop in building up, sanctifying, the people of God.