All Saints Margaret Street.

Dear friends,

As we approach the beginning of a new “academic” year this Autumn, I am very pleased to be able to share with you details of a number of opportunities for theological formation over the coming months, and in particular the seminars we have arranged for our Zoom Theology programme over the next year.

Our Zoom Theology programme meets once every two months. We spend an hour online discussing a particular theological topic of interest. We usually have a text or book as the focus of our reflection which most people will have read in preparation for the session. Sometimes there is a guest speaker who will introduce the topic to be discussed.

We aim to make discussion as approachable as possible, and to give people the space they need to express their thoughts and questions. The aim is not brain-busting academic debate, but rather to help participants deepen their understanding of the Christian faith in whatever way is most useful for them.

Organising the event by Zoom also means a wide range of people can participate even if they don’t live in London. We regularly have participants tuning in from all over the country and from as far away as North America and South Africa.

I am very pleased that a range of interesting speakers have agreed to lead these seminars. These include Fr Steve Rice, Rector of St Timothy’s, Winston Salem, USA, whom many will remember preached for us recently. He will be leading the session online from North Carolina. Fr Charles Card-Reynolds, our speaker for January 2023, is Vicar of St Bartholomew’s, Stamford Hill, and is undertaking graduate research in the complex area of contested memorialisation in churches. In addition, I am very pleased that Fr Jeremy Haselock, a great friend of our parish, has agreed to speak next March about the text he co-wrote with Fr Roger Greenacre, “Sacrament of Easter.”

The programme of seminars we have organised over the next 12 months or so is laid out below. More information along with the Zoom link details for accessing the seminars is to be found on our parish website here. I look forward to exploring our faith together with those who tune in, and to discussing the questions and thoughts people have on these interesting topics.

Fr Peter

Tuesday 6th September 2022   7.00-8.00 pm

Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets of the Last Supper by Brant Pitre

This seminar, led by Fr Peter Anthony, will explore contemporary biblical scholarship concerning the Eucharist through Brant Pitre’s excellent recent work on the Jewish origins of the Mass.

Tuesday 15th November 2022.  7.00-8.00 pm

Christ and the Aliens: what would be the theological consequence of discovering life exists beyond our world?

Fr Steve Rice, Rector of St Timothy’s, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, will address the fascinating question of what difference it would make to Christian theology to discover we are not the only life forms in the universe.

Tuesday 24th January 2023   7.00-8.00 pm

When history is painful: difficult and contentious memorialisation in churches.

This seminar will be led by Fr Charles Card-Reynolds, and will take the example of S. George’s Cathedral, Kingston, St Vincent, which contains multiple colonial era memorials to those directly and indirectly involved with enslavement. How might we respond to the challenge of these memorials and those like them in Britain and her former colonies?

Tuesday 14th March 2023   7.00-8.00 pm

The Sacrament of Easter: the Rites of Holy Week

Fr Jeremy Haselock will explore with us the rich history of the rites of Holy Week: their origins; how we should celebrate them now; and their theological significance. Participants are encouraged to the excellent work Fr Jeremy co-wrote with Roger Greenacre, “The Sacrament of Easter.”

Tuesday 9th May 2023   7.00-8.00 pm

“Mary, Founder of Christianity” – who is the biblical Mary?

This seminar will be led by Fr Peter Anthony and will explore two recent works focussed on the New Testament evidence concerning the role of Mary the Mother of Jesus: Chris Maunder’s new book, entitled, “Mary Founder of Christianity,”; and Brant Pitre’s work, “Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary: Unveiling the Mother of the Messiah.”

Tuesday 11th July 2023   7.00 pm – 8.00 pm

Theologies of the Holocaust

Parishioner of All Saints’ Josh Dolphin recently spent a summer placement at Yad Vashem learning about the work of the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre. Josh will introduce a discussion thinking about Christian and Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust and ways in which we remember and commemorate that terrible period of European history.

Change to time of evening Masses

A series of slight changes to the times of our evening services will take place in early Autumn. To cut a long story short, we have decided to move all evening Masses from 6.15 pm to 6.30 pm, beginning on Monday 3rd October 2022.

We have been experimenting with celebrating the evening Mass at 6.15 pm for the past 9 months. It has become evident to me through that time that people would find 6.30 pm more convenient for a number of reasons. A slightly later start is better for those coming from offices, and it also allows more time for the celebrant at Low Masses to vest after Evening Prayer which takes place at 6.00 pm.

For me, one of the most important things is that all evening Masses are at the same time, so there is no confusion about what time liturgies are taking place. For this reason I want Low Masses on ordinary nights and High Masses on feast days to be at the same time.

All evening Masses will move to 6.30 pm from the beginning of October. This then means that the High Masses of the Festival Week will be at 6.30 pm.  If this works well through the autumn, which I sense very strongly it will, we can then move to having all our street-facing signage renewed in the New Year with our new permanently settled post-COVID schedule of services displayed (replacement of our rather tired-looking signs is one of the items on our current mission action plan).

Reflections on Walsingham

We continue a series of reflections on our parish pilgrimage to Walsingham a few weeks ago. We hear this week from Alex Read:

The first time I came to Walsingham was for the National Pilgrimage, during the May Day bank holiday. The day trip gave me a yearning to revisit Walsingham and take the time to explore why this little village meant so much to so many Anglo-Catholics. Our parish pilgrimage was the perfect opportunity to do just that.

What immediately struck me upon arriving in Walsingham was just how peaceful it was.   The shrine and its pilgrim accommodation are arranged around a central garden, neatly tended and lined with olive trees and rows of lavender. Here pilgrims find the perfect place to sit back, take it all in and find an inner peace. It was there, sat alone in the sunshine, reflecting on our services in the shrine, that I felt closer to God than I perhaps ever have.

I also very much enjoyed the pace of our pilgrimage. I’m a relative newbie to the church and to All Saints, so I didn’t quite know what to expect from Walsingham. Part of me was apprehensive that our schedule would be a little overbearing, but actually it was the perfect mix of worship, socialising and personal reflection.

I met some wonderful people there, and our regular communal meals in the refectory gave us ample time to get to know each other. The atmosphere was light and friendly, and I enjoyed being able to end each day by sharing a drink with other pilgrims in the village pub or shrine bar.

My personal highlight was the pilgrim’s walk to the Slipper Chapel – a Roman Catholic chapel on the edge of the village, at which pilgrims used to remove their shoes to walk the rest of the journey barefoot (hence the name!). It was a scorching hot day and it was so refreshing to be waking through such beautiful countryside, chatting to people about what made Walsingham so special to them.

I have fond memories of my time in Walsingham, and I look forward to visiting again soon. To those wanting a relaxed, sociable, and unmistakably Anglo-Catholic retreat from the hubbub of modern life, I could not recommend the pilgrimage more strongly.

Alex Read

From the Director of Music

Dr. Stephen Farr, Director of Music at All Saints’, writes:

This Sunday sees the departure of two members of the ASMS musical team as they take up new opportunities.

Will Forrest – our Organ Scholar since September 2020 – leaves to study for a postgraduate degree in music administration, while Chris Webb (Bass) is moving to take up a full time singing post as Vicar Choral at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Will and Chris have contributed immensely and with great good humour to the musical life of the parish during what one might euphemistically describe as interesting times… They leave with our gratitude and best wishes for their future musical endeavours.

Theological responses to the Holocaust

Parishioner of All Saints’, Josh Dolphin, has spent the summer in Yad Vashem on a placement.

Josh teaches at Marylebone School, which enjoys an ongoing relationship with the Holocaust Education Trust. Each year they take a group of British teachers to Israel’s World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, Yad Vashem. This year proved to be Josh’s turn in their History Department.

Josh has agreed to give a Zoom Theology seminar, drawing on some of his experiences on Tuesday 11th July 2023 at 7.00 pm. Below are some of his reflections on his summer in Yad Vashem to introduce the subject to us in preparation for his Zoom seminar.

Introducing Theology and the Holocaust: Where is God?

Here are two angles that cut oppositely over the question of how God lurks in human affairs.

‘God is not the strategist… of our historical condition, but rather the mystery of our futurity… see God less as an interferer whose insertion is welcome (when it accords with our needs) and more as the immensity whose reality is our prefiguration.’ Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust, 1981.

‘God should have mercy on us, and save us from their hands in the blink of an eye.’ A footnote by Rabbi Kolynymus Kalman Shapira on a sermon given in the Warsaw Ghetto, added 27th November 1942. The final entry of a secret journal found hidden in a milk canister after the Second World War.

The first from Arthur Cohen, a Jewish postwar theologian who delicately positions the divine as setting rather than setter of human affairs. Secondly, we have the fraught scribbles of Rabbi Shapira, who openly searched for God’s foot at the treadle of the horrors that surrounded him and his congregation. Almost one year to the day he jotted those words, this leader of Poland’s Hasidic community was killed at Trawniki concentration camp, 3rd November 1943.

Shapira used his sermons to implore God as the very ‘strategist’ Cohen later discounted, but not for some specific remedy he thinks will resolve his ‘historical condition’. When this Rabbi flatly demands that God ‘save us from their hands in the blink of an eye’, he invokes the very ‘mystery of our futurity’, the very ‘immensity’ of possible action that Cohen puts in contrast to the ‘strategist… historical’ Almighty. The split between ‘historical condition’ and the ‘mystery’ of the time to come simply does not read for Shapira; to survive in the first is to remonstrate with the second.

I have put these quotes together to beg the question of Cohen’s admirable effort to let a certain fly out of a certain bottle: the vision of a God who is interventionist and remote, which at first glance seems to be the dreadful prospect that Rabbi Shapira is contending with.

We should take seriously instead that straightforward appeals like Shapira’s speak of a hard-won intimacy with the sustaining, all-encompassing God of ‘mystery’ and ‘futurity’ that Cohen commends.

By the time he wrote the prayer for intercession above, Shapira had served as rabbi through the enclosure of the Warsaw Ghetto, the horrendous deprivation and brutality it housed, and narrowly survived being picked out in a mass deportation to the death camp at Treblinka.

When this man writes that God ‘should… save us’, then what meaningful difference can we really draw between a God ‘interferer, whose insertion is welcome’, and a God dispersed into ‘mystery’ and ‘immensity’? This is the faith position on the Holocaust for Rabbi Shapira, not its dividing line.

Josh Dolphin

No Evening Mass on Monday 29th August

Please note that there will be no evening Mass on Monday 29th August as it is the practice of our parish not to have a 6.15 pm Mass on public bank holidays. The 12 noon Mass will take place as normal.

Guest preacher next Sunday

We look forward to welcoming Fr Barry Orford as our preacher at the 11.00 am High Mass on Sunday 4th September. Fr Barry is a good friend of our parish and is well known to many. We look forward to hearing his words.

Pilgrimage of Healing and Renewal

Fr Richard Bastable, Vicar of St Luke’s, Shepherd’s Bush, has been in touch to say he has several places spare on his coach for the Pilgrimage of Healing and Renewal which takes place at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham on Monday’s Bank Holiday. The coach leaves at 7.00 am from St Luke’s and costs £25. It returns to St Luke’s in the last evening of the same day. Please be in touch directly with Fr Bastable as soon as possible if you would like to take up any of those coach places: rbastable@gmail.com

Links for Sunday

The links for the livestream and service sheet for this Sunday’s High Mass are at the end of this email.

Evensong and Benediction is at 6pm on Sunday. The music includes Ireland’s Service in F and Parry’s My soul, there is a country.

Flowers

The flowers this Sunday are given in blessed memory of Michael John Harding (priest) whose 40th year’s mind falls on August 29th this year.

We are looking for volunteers to help with the flowers in church and the Courtyard Garden. If you have a particular talent for flower arranging or gardening and would like to help from time to time or on a regular basis, please contact Shawn on 07988 287 662 or shawnwilbe@outlook.com.

If you would like to make a donation for flowers or the garden, please contact Shawn.

Prayer list

The sick

Fr. Harry Hodgetts, Elizabeth Lyon, James Shrimpton, David Robin, Gloria Fleming, Sebastian Taite-Ellis, David Craig, Martin Berka, Sara Kennedy, Donald McWhinney, James Rodger, Peter Jewkes, John Kelly, Francis Lillie

The faithful departed

Alastair Putt, Kallistos Ware Bp.

Anniversaries of death

August 27th – Ellen Noble, Lucy Cook, Dawn Hart
28th – Christine Sanderson, Michael Bull, Nora Leyland, Kenneth Eaves, Evelyne Mginah, Donald Black
29th – Denis Campkin, Joan Saint, Michael John Harding Pr.
30th – John Miller, Amelia Stephens, Tom Chalmers
31st – Peter Davidson, Patricia Williams
September 1st – Edward Tagoe, Vera Arde-Acquah
2nd – Sophie Garrett, Kathleen Heales, Betty Little

The Friends of All Saints’

August 27th – Charles Thomson, James Thomson, Jeremy Thorp, Daniel Turner, Christine Vaughn Lillie
28th – Sam Walsh, Christopher Walsh, Christopher Waterhouse, Philip Wayne, Fr. Benjamin Weitzmann
29th – Michael Westcott, James White, Matthew Whittaker, Tim Widdowfield, David Wilcox, Ian Wilson
30th – Juliet Windham, Philip Wood, Martin Woods, Martin Wooley, David Wright, Fr. John Wylam
31st – Friends in special need
September 1st – Mark Allan, Martin Amherst-Lock, Bryan Anderson, Mary Attenborough, Stephen Attenborough, Richard Ayling
2nd – James Babington Smith, Ruth Baker, Stephen Barber, Fr. Roger Beck, Joy Blacklock