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Beyond the Grey Skies - Again

I'm probably not going to get a chance to blog as much about 4 Corners Festival Belfast this year as I would like or normally do, because I have barely enough time to write the stuff I absolutely have to write and do for the events I am involved with this week (and my day-job)... Indeed yesterday morning's service on Radio Ulster (which you can listen to on BBC Sounds for the next month until it self-destructs Mission Impossible-style) was a metaphor for my week, in that we ran out of time and had to axe Mylie Brennan reading my poem/meditation based on St. Francis' "Canticle of Creation". Of course St. Francis' poem was also part of the inspiration for, and the source of the title of "Laudato si'" the encyclical by Pope Francis about caring for our common home, the Earth. Dr Lorna Gold, our preacher on Sunday morning and lecturer last night in another stimulating event at Jennymount Methodist Church, was, only this week, appointed the new executive director of the global Laudato Si' movement in a private audience with the Pope, so we are doubly honoured to have had her as our special speaker this weekend. Last night's event was not livestreamed - none of our events are this year, as we seek to get people back out of their physical corners to visit new places this year - but it and other events are being recorded and I will post a link here. But you can hear her again as part of the online seminar series "Thinking Aloud" run by Belfast South and Dun Laoghaire Methodist on 11th March. To register for that and fir further information, contact:
thinkingaloudseminar@icloud.com.

In the meantime, here is the poem we cut out of yesterday's broadcast service, which, I would hazard to say, captures some of the sense of Pope Francis' and Dr Gold's exhortation, that whilst taking the environmental crisis and our common stewardship of the earth seriously  we should not lose hope or sight of the creator who stands behind it all:

Beyond the grey sky
sits brother sun
but his heat drives brother wind
and draws the waters
into clouds.

Those clouds, our sisters,
that shield the sun
bear the water, 
sustaining sister water, 
to the parched earth;
mother earth.

From earth we came; 
to earth we return,
but all through our lives
we are watched over
by you, our Father God;
unseen, all seeing.

Grey sky may loom over us
but brother sun shines on,
and your love for us
is more constant than the sun,
with no beginning and no ending.
Praise you.

Selah

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