Events for April!
Getting closer to a space and regular meetings too
Hello Friends,
We’re still hunting for the perfect new venue and will hopefully have news soon for a seasonally appropiate resurrection of our regular meetings.
In the meantime the AJC Patriarch, Mar Iohannes, will be holding an online Tenebrae - The Service of Shadows for Holy Week, our own Deacon Jon will be doing a reading as part of it so please feel free to join us. This is a quite, contemplative service focussed on the themes of darkness and hope of Holy Week, leading up to the joy of the Easter holiday.
The Service of Tenebrae
Wednesday, April 16 · 9:00pm Montreal Time.
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/xmb-suha-guw
Our next event is a field trip to St. Joseph’s Oratory for a selfguided tour around. We’ll meet there at 2pm and if you need a drive we’ll have a vehicle leaving from the Mile End and here’s the public transport details:
https://www.saint-joseph.org/en/place-of-welcome/visiting-the-shrine/
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For those who want to know more about Tenebrae and it’s meaning, here’s some opening words Mar Iohannes gave a few years back for a previous Tenebrae online service.
The structure and motion of the liturgical year and the secret of its transformative power- lies not in what it does but with whom. It gets its power in cooperation with our spiritual journey.
By that I mean- it does not change, and it’s transformative power lies in the fact that it does not change, but rather that we change.
Like a sundial, or perhaps a standing stone, the fixed nature of the calendar journey is such that it enables us to mark and contrast our change against it.
We change as we walk around and amongst the feasts, commemorations and seasons - seeing some of the shadows they cast, from the front, from the side, from above and from the back.
Roughly a year ago, you and I, we, in fact, sat in this shared space- with the familiar things of life fading in rear view and a dark unknown upon the horizon.
Now we gather together here again, in a likewise liminal time - only with that unknown having become the familiar behind us, and new unknowns upon the horizon.
Those two moments sound the same, and outwardly they even look the same-
and yet our experience tells us they are different - our understanding is shaped by the lights and shadows of time and context and experiences, as numerous and unique as each one of us gathered here, as common as the experience we have all just shared and continue to share.
They are different because we are different. They change because we change.
A million shadows of loss and grief, a million lights of connection and opportunity.
The ritual we did then, being the same one we will do in a few moments- tells us that the light is with us but a little while longer.
Any time you establish two points- a third is exists implicitly between them - anybody who participates in esotericism knows that, and even scripture alludes to it - wherever two or more are gathered there I am also.
Likewise Sacred space is a physical boundary created by intention, action and veneration between points in space.
But Sacred time isn’t just the moments we set aside in those sacred places- it is the time between those points. The rituals bookend time in a way that sanctifies and contextualizes the distance and space between them.
Tenebrae, the ritual of shadows tells us that the light is with us just a little while longer, but our experience of the space between these two ritual points in time, and between you and I as people and between ourselves and the divine, tell us- shows us- exemplifies through us- that the darkness will only last a little while longer also.
May all the lights of Holy Week illuminate the dark places that seem unknown and difficult, and may all the shadows fall in such a way so as to soften edges and contours, and give shape, colour and richness to the spaces and times we hold for each other.- to experience the tapestry we call the Pleroma.
In the name of the Pleroma, the Word and the thought. Amen.