Welcome to St Mary's the Virgin 

There is a free magazine full of recipes that comes through the vicarage letterbox at various times and this month one of the lead articles is called ‘Midweek Made Easy’. My immediate thought, contrary soul that I am, was ‘why would they be hard?’ After all, Johnny Cash famously sang that the best cars were always made on Wednesdays, the very middle of the week. With certain ingredients, says the magazine article, the worst midweek can be made palatable.

​

            The song and the article though, are both based on the same idea - that the middle of the week is dull: ordinary, and therefore difficult – how will we get through it? I am conscious that I am writing at the very end of ordinary time, the longest season of the Church’s year, and needless to say, it is not designed to be dull. Green time, (as you have heard me say often gentle reader), is growing time: it may feel like the in-between episode, sandwiched by festivities, but it is the period when the most growth happens: harvest comes at the end of it. And as every farmer, gardener and according to Johnny Cash, car manufacturer knows, the most fruitful harvest comes when the product has been carefully nurtured all through its creation, which means Wednesdays are important.

​

            So next time it is Wednesday, channel your own inner Jeremiah – “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning…” The midweek needs no making easy, simply keep God’s love as one of its ingredients.

           

Fr Neil.