We live together as brothers in Christ, rooted in the Anglican tradition and formed in the monastic round of prayer, worship and ministry. We welcome others to come, see, learn and share. https://mirfield.org.uk/update-regarding-coronavirus-covid-19/

News

Eric Simmons CR

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Our dear brother Eric CR died on Tuesday 19th January, after a short illness (non Covid-19 related).

Eric was in his 91st year and the 58th year of his profession in the Community.

Eric served as Superior of the Community from 1974 until 1987.

We give thanks to God for our brother, for his faithfulness to God and steadfast love for others, and invite you to pray with us for the repose of his soul.

We shall give notice of the funeral arrangements once they have been finalised.

Thank-you for your prayers for all the Community.

Miles for Masvingo

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Well done to Fr John, Br Marc, Fr Charlie, Joseph and Hugh CoR who completed 5K in 30mins, for Masvingo last weekend!

Thankfully the weather was kind and Fr John got to try out his new running trainers, which had been left unused due to the cancellation of all his running events in 2020.  

Thank you all for your hard work and thank you to everyone who has donated.

If you haven’t donated yet there’s still time to do so at https://cafdonate.cafonline.org/14579#!/DonationDetails

Thank you for your continued support!

A Warm Welcome Awaits!

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The College is warmly welcoming enquiries and applications from prospective students.

If you, or anyone you know, is interested in preparing for ordained ministry then The College of The Resurrection could be the place for you. We are currently offering a “Zoom Tour” and can organise conversations with current students.

You can also obtain an application form with a view to Zoom interviews.

Personal visits will be offered once circumstances allow.

Please visit our website or email gjohnson@mirfield.org.uk  for further information. 

Your nomination really counts!

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You can still nominate us in Ecclesiastical’s 12 days of giving, your nomination could be the one that helps us win £1,000!

Open to eligible charities in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Channel Islands and Isle of Man, Ecclesiastical will be donating a total of £120,000 to 120 charities over 12 days in December and we’d love to be one of them.

It’s quick and easy to nominate us, just click the link https://www.movementforgood.com/12days/index.php… Nominations are open now, closing at midnight the day before each draw. Charities not drawn will be carried over to the next draw, and draws will take place each weekday from 7 December to 22 December 2020. The more nominations we get, the greater our chance of winning, so please spread the word to your friends and family. Thank you in advance for your time and support.

CR’s New Streaming Page

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Join with us is the title of our new page on Facebook dedicated to live-streaming our services to the wide world. Usually the numbers watching are in the hundreds, while a smaller group of regulars send in comments, and now even greet each other as they come on line. Throughout the spring and summer we just pointed the camera at the Community in church. However, for a little more effort there are excellent resources for doing better than that. It has been an enjoyable challenge to arrive at a point where we can use a number of cameras to give different views and close-ups, for instance.

Help and advice have been there, but only of limited use, as we are so unusual. Experts on streaming are used to advising parish churches on broadcasting, say, one service a week, with days to prepare it, and taking an hour or so to get it up and off the ground on the Sunday morning. We broadcast four services a day, seven days a week, and need to be able to walk into church and click it on straight away without any preparation. A long period of experiment has led us eventually to light on the best way of doing it for our circumstances – watchers will know it has been a bumpy ride at times. We are now using an “app” called Cinamaker, which enables a brother to sit in his stall and control all the cameras while singing away at the same time. With an iPad he can switch between cameras, zoom in, control the sound and lighting, and the focus. We try and iron out the glitches, but human frailty has a way of finding its way in. The Internet might have a hiccup, or a brother forget to switch on the sound system, or another forget to have checked whether a camera’s charge has got too low, and for these we can only ask your patience. In the coming period we hope to be training individual brothers to operate the system. It’s pretty simple to use, but we may have to depend a little longer on the long-suffering good nature of the people tuned in to us!

Monastic worship by its nature is very simple and lacking in frills, but there is an opportunity to help people who aren’t monks and nuns to engage with it more, and so we hope to be able in due course to make imaginative use of our art works during, say, the Psalms, or even show other appropriate pictures connected with the theme being sung or read about.

In connection with all this we are launching a small appeal to cover costs. There has been equipment to buy, and a small annual subscription to Cinamaker, which viewers might like to help us with. Our aim is to raise enough to cover the cost of those things, with a proposal that any donations over that amount would go towards the commissioning of two art works which we have been waiting for some time to put in place. One is a diptych of two paintings about St James by Nicholas Mynheer, for the St James’s Chapel, and the other a column for the holy water stoup in church. The estimated cost of the artworks is yet to be finalised, and more information will appear in due course.

Why should a religious community commission art works? If the church was just for ourselves, we would never do it. But our church at Mirfield is very public, a place of mission and training. With it we have an opportunity to inspire people in a world a lot more artistic than it used to be. One cannot overestimate the power of place and the deep potential effect of artistic experience, and in our times these need to play their part in drawing people to Christ and in helping one another grow in Christ. And, as I have already said, we hope that art will play an important place in our streaming as we go along.

If you would like to make a contribution, you can donate online at https://cafdonate.cafonline.org/15217 If you can’t do that, you can send a cheque to The Community of the Resurrection, with an accompanying letter saying it is for the live streaming/ art project.

Thank you to all.

George CR

Support us while you shop!

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Great news!

There are now two ways in which you can help raise money for the Community or the College (Frere Educational Trust) at no additional cost to yourself.

We’ve registered with easyfundraising, it’s a great site where you can help CR or the Frere Educational Trust raise funds simply by doing your everyday online shopping!

Over 4,000 big name retailers are included, such as John Lewis, Uswitch, ASOS, Argos, Expedia, M&S, and BT.

Every time you shop, we receive a small donation to say ‘thank you!’ It’s completely free and over £31M has been raised for causes just like us so far.

We want to raise as much as possible so please sign up and help us at:

http://www.easyfundraising.org.uk/causes/cotrmirfield/

https://www.easyfundraising.org.uk/causes/frereeducationaltrust/?from404=1

AmazonSmile is a simple and automatic way for you to support a charity of your choice every time you shop, at no cost to you. AmazonSmile is available at www.smile.amazon.co.uk on your web browser and can be activated in the Amazon Shopping App for iOS and Android phones.

To shop at AmazonSmile simply go to www.smile.amazon.co.uk on your web browser or activate AmazonSmile on your Amazon Shopping app on your iOS or Android phone (found under ‘settings’ on your app). On your browser, you may also want to add a bookmark to smile.amazon.co.uk to make it even easier to return and start your shopping at AmazonSmile.

Welcome Back!

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Few Mirfield students think their time here quite complete until they have returned for Deacons’ Week. It was our privilege, last month, to welcome back seven deacons who left the College in 2019. Their visit allowed us to trial our social distancing measures for the new term and so it was with some confidence that The College of The Resurrection reassembled on St Matthew’s Day. We hope to deliver the curriculum “face to face” both to those completing their BA at Sheffield and to those who will begin working towards one of the Durham University Common Awards.

CoR

Book Review – Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin and the World it Created.

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By Nicholas Ostler

Latin is a language dead as dead could be;
first it killed the Romans and now it’s killing me.

So we used to chant as schoolboys, though actually I loved Latin even then. What people do not realise is that Latin was not confined to the Ancient Romans but remained, in many different ways, a living language up until modern times. Even today, though its use has greatly declined, it is still learned, enjoyed and seems to have a place in the formation of the human mind.

Ostler, in this fascinating book, shows us some of the roots of Latin not only in Greek but in Etruscan and some the other languages of the people of Italy. Greek, of course, was hugely influential on Latin in helping Latin to develop literary and poetic forms. Ostler gives some attention to the classical period of Latin but then traces the different trajectories as Latin morphed into the Romance languages: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian over the next thousand years. At the same time, Latin remained the language of the Church throughout Europe and, of course, of all educated men. The Latin changed, simplified but remained still Latin. With the Renaissance and the rise of the humanists a great effort was made to recover classical Latin and to write it in the mode of Cicero and Livy. This continued for three centuries until the new languages of Europe were developed enough to talk about modern things. Curiously, the last people to write regularly in Latin seem to have been the scientists who used this common tongue to gain a hearing and participate in a dialogue across Europe. Isaac Newton, for instance, wrote all his major works in Latin.

Yet Latin was tied to the Roman Empire. The German tribes were never colonised by Rome and retained their own language. England was colonised but it would seem that most Romans and Latin speakers lived in the West of England which suffered a great plague about the time the Romans left in the fifth century. Thus England was left with the largely Germanic language of Anglo-Saxon.

My one regret about this book is that it doesn’t have a chapter on Latin today. Perhaps that will come in the form of a new book. Although Latin and Greek are much less studied at University level now there is much very high quality work done on classical subjects in the universities. Latin has also been popularised by some inspired writers and people who were deprived of learning Latin at school show interest in the language and literature later on. Part of the magic of Harry Potter is the corrupted Latin of the spells!

Book Review – Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

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By Jonathan Sacks

Jonathan Sacks is the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and a well-known writer and speaker. In this fascinating book he deals with a problem which has arisen in the Western world over the past century, but especially since the Sixties: is there a moral law we can all sign up to? The main reason for this problem, he believes, is that western civilization is no longer about ‘us’ but about ‘me’.  People are only concerned for society, the nation, humankind in so far as it affects themselves. It is ‘I’ who matters most. Morality can then be summed up as “I can do what I like so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.” That is generally enough for modern society. It is not enough, says Sacks, for humankind.

His arguments are well backed up by all kinds of literature, philosophy and sociological research. One typical example speaks for all: the rise in suicides of young to middle aged people. These are people who are able, well educated, successful but commit suicide because they can see no meaning in their lives. The search for ever more exciting experience leads them to the conclusion that there are no more. So why go on living? Research shows that people who concentrate on increasing their own happiness do not in fact become happier. They become more frustrated and depressed as each new experience turns out to be empty. However, people who try to help others find their own happiness increases. They are fulfilled and their lives have meaning. This is not new knowledge; nor is it rocket science. It has been around for centuries, if not millennia. Our modern and post-modern attempt to prove it wrong has clearly failed.

Those of us who believe in God can root our morality in God and in the biblical revelation. Those who do not wish to root their morality in God must still look outside themselves to the people they live with if they are going to be happy.

Clearly this is vastly oversimplified description of a complex but very well written book. It really is a ‘must read’ for our troubled generation.