St Felix Rc Parish Newsletter - 6th Sunday 2008

MOTHER TERESA I never got to meet Mother Teresa, but I did spend some time in one of her communities. Across the desert and up into the mountains of central Yemen lies the industrial city of Ta'izz . Westerners don't venture there all that much. Men sit idle in the streets, swish flies and chew qat. The markets sell cheap Russian machine guns. It was quite a while before I discovered the leper colony on the outskirts of town. Hidden from view, men and women with stumpy digits and skin covered in sores would play chess or lie quietly in the shade. Many in Ta'izz itself didn't even know the place existed. But there amongst the frightened and the forgotten were those wonderful Indian nuns from Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. That leper colony was a place of silent desperation and abandonment, a rubbish tip beyond the city wall. There was nothing glamorous about the work of those nuns. And they had no audience to applaud them doing it, which is why they've always been a huge inspiration for my own, considerably more meagre, Christian faith. Mother Teresa died ten years ago this week. But it's only now that we've began to appreciate the full personal cost of her commitment to the poor. Letters just published expose a faith that was tortured and doubt-ridden for almost fifty years. From about the time she started her ministry to the poor in the gutters of Calcutta , her spiritual life all but dried up. "I am told God loves me," she wrote, "and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul." Had Mother Teresa secretly lost her faith? I don't think so. For 'dryness', and 'torture' - again, her words - are the psychological realities of a life spent fighting for breath under an avalanche of human misery. Her faith was all the more profound and impressive precisely because it wasn't premised upon subjective assurance. It wasn't all about that very modern spiritual obsession: 'how it all feels'. When well-meaning agnostics naively say "I envy you your faith" they presume faith to be something that makes us Christians contented or fulfilled. Actually, it often doesn't work like that at all. For despite the sickly-sweet certainties of some contemporary religion, many of the holiest of people experience faith as though it were almost a wound. Christians are all called to follow Christ to the place of abandonment; that too was situated on a rubbish tip outside the city wall. In reality, few of us have the courage to make it that far. The fact that Mother Teresa camped out on that tip for fifty years is what made her inner life so dark and her faith a shining inspiration for millions. I do hope she's made a saint soon. Thought for the Day, 3 September 2007 The Rev. Dr Giles Fraser

ST. FELIX PARISH NEWSLETTER 8, Gainsborough Rd., Felixstowe IP11 7HT 01394 282561 E-Mail: [email protected] Parish Priest: Fr David Hennessy Website : www.saintfelix.org.uk

February 15th, 2009

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SIXTH SUNDAY, B

SATURDAY 6pm SUNDAY 9am: 10.30am St Cecilia’s: 11.30am

COLLECTIONS LAST WEEK OFFERTORY: £ 700.90

MASSES THIS COMING WEEK at the Convent

CAFOD: £ 178.82

Monday, Wednesday—Saturday Mass at 10.00am TUESDAY: Eucharistic Service

MANY THANKS INDEED FOR YOUR GENEROSITY!

AT St FELIX FRIDAY at 12noon

PLEASE REMEMBER IN YOUR PRAYERS ALL WHO ARE SICK AND THOSE WHO HAVE DIED RECENTLY OR HAVE ANNIVERSARIES:

LITURGY GROUP MEETING has now been confirmed 7.30pm Monday, 23rd February

PARISH QUIZ and supper to be held in the Church Hall on Shrove Tuesday 24th February 7.30 p.m. (supper to be sausage and mash followed by pancakes) Tickets £4 will be on sale next weekend 7th February

Barbara Strong, Peter Hunter, Peter Begbie, Bernard Davies, Evelyn O’Leary, Sr Felicity Moody, Frances Haylock, William Cremonini, Catherine Hollis, Alice Smith, Fr Cyril Banham, Ellen Summerfield, Joan Webster, Beryl Hockley, Sean Flynn, Winifred Smith, Mary Stocker, Winifred Mason, Daniel Mullin-Henderson, Alice Hall, Patrick O’Donnell. RIP

LENTEN HUNGER LUNCHES To be held Fridays during Lent, at 12.30pm in St. Felix Hall. Minimum Donation: £1.50

BIBLE SOCIETY

In aid of CAFOD and the Bishop's Appeals.

SOUP-ER DAY BEAT THE WINTER BLUES! COME AND ENJOY A BOWL OF HOME-MADE SOUP AT JUNE COLE’S 29 Lynwood Avenue

Please note there is no hunger lunch on Friday 20th March.

ALL WELCOME Organised by the C.W.L.

on SATURDAY, 14th FEBRUARY NOON—2pm BRING & BUY TABLE ( Proceeds to Bible Society )

CHRISTIAN AID

A sincere thank you to everybody who supported the recent hunger lunch at St. Felix. We raised £136. ************ OTHER IDEAS FOR PARISH LENTEN ACTIVITIES WOULD BE WELCOME