Productive Fridays are my favourite

Hope you're having a good week and are not suffering too much from several days so cold as to not really be believed and now this miserable rain. Anyway, I have some photos from this week to make you feel better. 

This was dawn over the Mistley Churchyard on Thursday. I think it was about -5 at the time, but look how pretty it was. So worth it.

Here's a bit of Christmas cheer. Woolly Christmas (which was, allegedly, so successful that it is on next year's Christmas list) and the Mistley Buggy Clubbers decorating the tree. They've done it beautifully.

And finally, for all those who aren't coming up to Bradfield this week:

He looks like a jaunty spy. 

I've got some more festive photos lined up, and please, if you take pictures at events and on walks and when you make a great cake, send them in. It's good to share. Sesame Street taught me that.

Mary

Church Office

Nearly-St.-Lucia-photos

That's right. I always intended to post these mid-week. Or not. Given our average Friday in the office, I'm surprised that I've ever intended to try and write these posts then. Oh well.

In case you weren't there, this is what the Benefice Advent Light service looked like at Mistley.

And this was Paul and Pollie's wedding from a few weeks back.

Have a good week and stay warm.

Mary
Church Office

Last week's photos...a bit late!

Finally, I found time to put these together. Easily the best photos of last week. Click on them to have a proper look. Messy Church was great. Come along next time, if you weren't there!

I've got some good ones ready for the next few weeks. But I'm not against putting up several. So keep sending them. Have a happy snow-day!

Mary
Church Office

Happy thanksgiving!

The weekly photo competition (of which I shall be an entirely biased judge) starts here, and has, in fact, already been won this week. It wasn't hard. I love thanksgiving. I love a nifty t-shirt. I'm a fan of Ruby. The win was inevitable.

Have a good week!

Mary 

Church Office

New life!

St. Mary and St. Michael, Mistley with Manningtree

At this chilly, bare-branched time of year, there is rarely talk of new life. The snowdrops seem a little far away right now, not to mention the daffodils. This blog, however, is having a Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe epiphany: it has been always winter, but now it's nearly Christmas. Welcome to the newly revamped Manningtree Benefice Blog!

We're in the midst of changing our website, but while we do, we can't do a lot with it! Therefore, our sadly neglected blog  which has languished, unused and unloved for too long, has a new lease of life. Please do check here for news and events coming up. What's more, our general service pattern and our special Christmas services, and more besides, are all available on the tabs at the top of the page.

St. Lawrence, Bradfield

We're also on facebook. Search for 'Manningtree Benefice' and like us for updates and more. We're needy like that.

That's it, for now. Stay warm and look forward to the snowdrops.

Mary
Church Office

Christmas 2010

Dear Friends,

Advent is a season of expectation and preparation, as the Church prepares to celebrate the coming of Christ into the world, which traditionally both looks back to the first coming of Christ and looks forward to the second coming or return of Christ.

As Christmas Eve approaches, the mood changes from longing and expectation to joy and recognition. The song of the Church changes from ‘Maranatha’ - ‘Our Lord, come’ (1 Corinthians 16:22) to ‘Christ is born today’ with alleluias and glorias ringing out through the church’s worship and liturgy.

As we wait with, and through, the familiar characters in the gospel stories, just as Christ was formed in Mary so let us reflect on Christ being formed in our lives, coming again to us, to be born again in us this Christmas time. 

Maranatha! Our Lord, come! 

Revd. Chris Hills

Big Bang Day

Big Bang Day
If you are reading this I guess it didn’t happen. I mean the world didn’t end. I write this on Tuesday 9th September, the day before Big Bang Day, when the long awaited particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva is switched on for the first time. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest atom smashing machine has been designed to smash together beams of phenomenally high velocity protons in order to discover more about the nature of matter and what the universe was like one trillioneth of a second after the big bang that created the universe. One fear that has been expressed about this experiment is that the scientists will inadvertently create black-holes here on earth into which we will all be instantly sucked never to reappear, heralding the end of the world.

I’m carrying on writing this in the confident hope that this doesn’t happen and that you’ll still be here tomorrow to read these musings. The scientists at LHC are hoping that these high energy pile ups will allow them to see a particle that has long been predicted to exist but hasn’t yet been seen – the oddly named Higgs boson. If they see it for the first time, that of course will be exciting and will confirm their theories; but if they don’t see it that may be even more exciting because it could lead to a whole rethink about the basics of nuclear physics – akin to the great rethinks in the days of Copernicus or Newton.

The existence of the Higgs boson was proposed by Professor Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University in 1964 in order to explain the origin of mass in the universe. Such is the theoretical importance of the Higgs boson and its predicted omnipresence in all matter, it has been dubbed ‘the God particle’.

Now that God has been mentioned it is worth asking where does all this leave belief in a creator? Will the LHC experiments get us any nearer to proving or disproving the existence of God? Could further experiments take us back to before the big bang? Nuclear physics has been amazingly successful in helping us to understand the evolution of the universe that we see and experience today. We can investigate its development right back to the tiniest fraction of a second after the big bang, when space and time exploded into being. However, to go back and consider the nature of things before the big bang at the beginning of the universe makes no logical sense at all, because there was no time before the big bang – the dimension of time was created in that explosion. The universe we experience today depends on something beyond both space and time and therefore beyond the realm of physics. This leaves plenty of room for a belief in a creator – one who doesn’t just ‘light the blue touch paper and retire immediately’ but who sustains the whole space-time web in being.

All this is giving me a bit of a headache: I think that I’ll go and have a lie down confident that Richard Dawkins doesn’t have all the answers.

Andy