Over this coming month AIM will be offering a range of different online opportunities for prayer and community connection.
This Saturday, 2nd May 2020, we will have the first of our online guided meditations, with the focus on one of the most powerful and beautiful texts written by Jesuit priest and scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – ‘The Mass on the World’.
Teilhard de Chardin was on a scientific expedition in China in the 1920s and he found himself, looking out over the Gobi Desert, without the bread and wine he needed for the Eucharist. A great desire was there; however, much like our community at the moment, in the midst of the Covid-19 restrictions, it was not possible to celebrate Mass as usual.
And so he turned to creation to provide him with the elements he needed for his prayer and offering. In his imagination, he found bread and wine in the labours of the uncountable multitude of humanity and in the bounty of the earth’s produce. Almost a century later, his words still resonate, asking us too to see God’s presence in the world around us and to open ourselves to the “pure majesty of the real itself”.
“I place on my paten, my God, the harvest to be gathered from this new labour. I pour into my chalice the juice to be pressed from all the earth’s fruits today.”
During the time of prayer together, we will have the chance to reflect on our experience of the world without our usual way of participating in Mass. We will look to the efforts of all those who are working in the health and care services and give thanks for all they are doing, as we offer their labours, and our own hopes and fears, to God.
“Everything that will increase in the course of this day in the world, everything that will diminish, everything that will die. This, Lord, is what I am trying to gather together so as to offer it to you; this, the substance of my sacrifice, the only one you desire.”
And, in closing, we will have the opportunity to share with each other something of our experience of the prayer, or something of our experience of the world around us at the moment.
Please join us this Saturday at 7.00pm. If you are interested in taking part, via Zoom, please register via https://forms.gle/FoABs3GCnGP2tK5x8.
