Weekly Record
2 August 2009
 Apparently
many people have abandoned holidays abroad to camp, caravan or bed and
breakfast in our own country this year. To date I have heard of four
families who set out to go camping within the last week, one on
pilgrimage to Walsingham, and have returned home early to dry out.
Having had a week of constant rain in the Northern Lakes last year (and
a week to come in Anglesey) I can sympathise with them. It is not so
much character forming as character drowning. Someone suggested that
all these holidays abroad have made us too soft and we’ve lost the
ability to tough it out coping with the vagaries of the British
weather? I’d like to see them say that to a family returning from a
week in the pouring rain! Anyway another week or two of this wet
weather and I think holidays abroad will be very much back on the
agenda. I wonder how the pilgrims in Lourdes fared with the weather in
France!
Archbishop Kelly will appear briefly this weekend
celebrating mass in the Crypt on Saturday evening. He returns from
Lourdes to pick up his luggage and travel documents and he is off to
relatives in the States for the month of August. I hope he will be
thinking of us while he is in mid flight this Sunday as we listen to
his Pastoral Letter.
I’m not sure what the collective word for a
group of organists is – perhaps a swell or a console etc – anyway there
is a conference for Cathedral organists being held here this weekend.
Most of this is behind closed doors but there are recitals on Saturday
and Sunday afternoons in the Cathedral as part of this conference.
There is also a visiting parish choir from the South of England here
all next week and they will sing at masses on Tuesday and Thursday
evening and evening prayer after mass on Friday evening.
Great
news to hear that the Everyman Theatre has been awarded a major grant
from the Arts Council for its proposed major rebuilding programme.
Hopefully this will mean that the rest of the funds that they require
will now fall into place. If all goes to plan it still means that the
new theatre will not be up and running until 2013!
Looking ahead
here are a few dates for the diary for the next month or so. The Feast
of the Assumption is celebrated on the weekend of 14th/15th August.
Piazza Art Markets will be held on Sundays 16th August and 20th
September. The Cathedral Community Mass takes place on 6th September.
The next Car Boot Sale will be held on 12th September. The Hope Street
Feast/Festival is on 20th September this year. Finally in September -
the Relics of St Therese of Lisieux will arrive at the Cathedral on
24th and leave on 25th September.
As it is the time of the year
for weddings and with the holidays families having time together, I
copy a family prayer that I came across this week, composed by Robert
Louis Stevenson – I think it stands the test of time.
Lord,
behold our family here assembled. We thank you for this place in
which we dwell, for the love that unites us, for the peace accorded us
this day, for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health,
the work, the food and the bright skies that make our lives delightful;
for our friends in all parts of the earth. Give us courage and
gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare us to our friends, soften us to
our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent
endeavours; if it may not, give us the strength to endure that which is
to come that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation,
temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates
of death, loyal and loving to one another. We beseech of you this
help and mercy for God’s sake.
Canon Anthony O'Brien
Cathedral Dean
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