Lent. Sunday night and today my sons had their 1st communion lesson.

Yep, its been over forty years since I had mine and so I couldnt recall it and give them advice. All I could do was drive them there and then take them home afterwards. The following they may read when older, but would not perhaps get a lot from at their age. Hopefully we can!

Its the period of Lent and it would be too easy for me to tell you that I have given up smoking and drinking for Lent. No, I would rather say I have been dissatatched to them, as I must also become with so many things of this world. I must be able to say and say and feel often enough. "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." and "Dead to sin and alive in Christ." 


The wilderness within

Most people`s wilderness is inside them, not outside. Thinking of it as outside is generally a trick we play upon ourselves - a trick to hide from us what we really are, ot comfortingly wicked, but incapabel, for the time being, of establishing communion. Our wilderness, then, is an inner isolation. It`s an absence of contact. It`s a sense of being alone - boringly alone, or saddeningly alone, or terrifyingly alone.
 Our isolation is really us - inwardly without sight or hearing or taste or tough. But it doesn`t seem like that. Oh no. I ask myself what I am isolated from, and the answer looks agonizingly easy enough. I feel isolated from Betty whom I love desperately and who is just the sort of woman who never could love me. And so to feel love, I thik, must be at the some time to feel rejection. Or I feel isolated from the social people who, if noise is the index of happiness, must be very happy indeed on Saturday evenings. Or I feel isolated from the competent people, the success-boys who manage to get thimselves into print without getting themselves into court. Or I feel isolated, in some curious way, from my work. I find it dull and uninviting. It`s meant - it used - to enliven me and wake me up. Now it deadens me and sends me to sleep.
  Is it to go on always like now, just - tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow - a slow procession of dusty greyish events with a lot of forced loughter, committee laughter, cocktail laughter, and streaks of downright pain?
  This then is our Lent, our going with Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted. And we might apply to it some words from the First Epistle of St Peter: `Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal which comes upon you to prove you, as though something strange were hoppening to you. But rejoice, in so far as you share Christ`s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.`
                                                                                                     H. A. WILLIAMS
  
GOD ALONE IS ENOUGH

 If I can see God in you and you can see God in me, then how can we not but love one another!

Peace and love to all beings. Your brother in Christ Jesus, Peter.