Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness

Yesterday was our first ‘Faith and the Fitz’ lunchtime talk at Michaelhouse Café, as David Bagnall introduced us to Stanley Spencer’s Angels of the Apocalypse, with its matronly angels, green English hills, and bedpans. And the day before that, Jon Sanders led a group exploring and practising contemplative prayer, an evening of quiet and peace that we’ll be holding every Tuesday during Lent at 7.30pm in Michaelhouse.

Our church is full of beautiful music — choral evensong twice a week, plus all the beauty of our Sunday morning worship. We had choral compline yesterday in the church, and the PCC has voted to reintroduce choral mattins on the third Sunday of each month at 11.30am — starting 20 March.

Outside the church, the May is in bloom and the daffodils have sprung up everywhere. Days are getting longer and on occasion we have even seen the sun in a blue sky.

I know the good weather won’t last — it’s an old Cambridge trick, a few warms days and then you have to wait ’til May for the rest — but I do know the beauty of holiness is indeed here with us: in music, in art, in silence, in fellowship, in words and in rest. We might find beauty in the extraordinary, as the choirs bring us to new heights, or in the very ordinary all around us.

Lent may be a penitential season but that doesn’t mean your time in prayer needs to be without beauty. Come enjoy the refreshment of our common worship and community, as we gather in many ways to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness (Ps 96.9)