Thanks again for your continued prayers for peace in the Middle East. Our gathering was small, but powerful last Sunday at St. Godric’s. Pope Francis has asked for a day of prayer, fast and abstinence next Friday, 27th , for Peace. We’re not forgetting Ukraine.
“Human beings suffer.
They torture one another.
They get hurt and they get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightening and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme"
Seamus Heaney The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes