The Shepherd, March 2010
WORK PROGRESS
FOR THE FIRST TIME in many a long year, the Brotherhood has been able to go about its work without having contractors on site. We are hoping to use this freedom gradually to improve the grounds, and particularly to establish the vegetable garden, helping to provide our own food. Last year, we made initial steps and learned a lot. This year, we have so far been hampered by extremely bad weather. However, the generous window sills in the new house, and the extra space in the bathrooms there, have afforded us room to bring on some early seeds, providing us with an excellent in-house potting shed.
Because of disease, the tree at the west end of the Church, a Douglas Fir, will have to be taken down, and we expect the contractors to do that about the time that you receive this magazine. To save money, we are hiring the tree surgeons only to cut down the tree and remove the stump - things which need to be done professionally. Fr Sabbas will undertake to clear the site, and so we apologize if, for a period, it is in a rather ragged state.
VISITORS
SURREY WALKS CLUB visited Saint Edward’s Church shortly before Vespers on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, 8th / 21st February. Their group comprised about ten people.
PRACTICAL TIP
AT PASCHA, let us be especially attentive to take to heed the teaching contained in the verse from the paschal canon, that we quoted at the beginning of this issue: “Let us partake of the new fruit of the vine of divine gladness.” Very often, people celebrate Pascha as a kind of folk festival, a time of joyous, raucous merry-making, even drunkenness, completely forgetting that it is a time of divine gladness. Our rejoicing should be spiritual, not carnal. That does not mean that we have to be puritanical and po-faced. There is none of that in Orthodoxy. However, we have struggled through the fast, not to abandon everything spiritual on the night of Pascha, but rather that we should enjoy the spiritual reality the more deeply, - that we should make glad for the victory of Christ over sin, death and the devil. We do not do that by sinning, pleasing the devil, and inviting our own spiritual death.
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