St. Joseph's Lunch Club will not meet on 29th July or in August and will start again on Wednesday 6th September. New guests are welcome to join us for a hot meal and chat, especially older people living alone.
Lifts are arranged across the Parish. New volunteers are needed to help occasionally to give lifts or help serve meals. For more information contact Kathleen Murray or Pat Conway
I am travelling across Connemara in torrential rain as I stop to write this bulletin piece. We welcome our new Bishop into the Diocese next Wednesday. Let us keep Bishop Stephen in our prayers at this challenging time for all of us. As you will have read in last week’s bulletin, I’d like to use the 10th Anniversary of the Durham Martyrs’ Parish as a time to reflect on preparing for the future. We’ve come a long way in 10 years. Thanks to all for working so generously in achieving this. Our schools are now winding down after a very busy and demanding year. Again, I say a big thank you to all our teachers and staff for their great efforts, sometimes in very difficult circumstances. Well done and have that much deserved Summer break. Special thanks and prayers to Fiona Westerman at St. Godric’s, who retires.
Tim Robinson, Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom
“ Thinking now of the luminous cleanliness and bell-like resonance of Aran’s limestone rock sheets, their parallel fissures pointing one to the edge of clear-cut cliffs, and the solace on a summer’s day of its spring wells that image the perfection of the wild flowers attendant on them, I realise what a difficult terrain is south Connemara: multidirectional from every point so complex in form it verges on the formless, disputing every step with stony irregularities, leechlike softness of bog or bootlace-catching twiggy heath. Often when visitors ask me what they should see in this region, I am at a loss. A curious hole in the ground? The memory of an old song about a drowning? Ultimately I have to tell them that this is a land without shortcuts.”
It has been 10 years since the first formal Mass as the Parish of the Durham Martyrs, at St. Leonard’s in June 2013. In preparation for this, we had spent a few years in formation, bringing together our neighbouring churches. One part of that was a Parish Development Day in November 2012 at St. Leonard’s Sixth Form Centre, where over 80 parishioners contributed to a series of wide-ranging discussions on our future together. At the celebration of my 40th anniversary as a serving Priest, I was inspired by the reflections of my dear friend, Fr. John O’Brien, who spoke about the best of times and the worst of times. I would like to invite you all to Parish Development Day 2, at St. Leonard’s on Saturday, 14th October. We need to look forward again to explore how we might create the best of times. I would like you all to reflect on our first 10 years and how we might build a stronger community in the future. Please put the date in your diary and further details will be shared after the summer break.
Thank you. Fr. Colm
