The auction to raise funds for the Organ Restoration and Vox Holloway's Community work was a grat success and we achieved our target.Many thanks to all involved - donors, volunteers, prformers and to everyone who came and enjoyed the evening and bought the wonderful array of lots.
All Souls Service of Remembrance
All Soul's Day is the traditional time in the church calendar when we remember our departed loved ones. This Sunday, 4th November, we hold our annual All Souls Service of Remembrance at 4pm, where we read out the names of those we have lost and miss. If you would like a name read out in the service, please contact Pat - patriciatomlinson@mac.com
Auction Action - 9th November 2012 - 7 pm at St Luke's
To see the Fantastic Lots copy the link into your browser: saintlukeschurch.org.uk/auction - Tickets are now on sale - email: lukevoxholloway@gmail.com - Bring your friends
£15, concs. £10 – includes dinner and a glass of wine/beer; Musical Interludes, Licenced Bar - The auction is in aid of St Luke’s Organ Restoration, Vox Holloway Community Choir and St Anne and All Saints, South Lambeth
The Gospel According To Sam Murphy
It's been said that ‘The Church is the Fifth Gospel’ and in our services at St Luke's we sometimes feature an additional Gospel reading – from the Gospel of this Church.
This past Sunday we heard a reading from the Gospel of St Luke’s West Holloway, according to Sam Murphy.
'I’d say I’ve been part of this church since about 1980, so that would be more than thirty years. I started coming along after I moved to the Clocktower Estate and never really stopped.
It was nearly 20 years before that, in 1962, when I came across to London from Ireland. I grew up in County Carlow but I’d been working as a gardener in Bray and then in Dublin. I was getting about £3 a week. You can get that much for an hour these days. A relative introduced me to this posh Irish man who had a landscape gardening firm in London. I met him on the Friday and I was on the boat on the Monday. The money was better, £9 a week, and better still when I got a job in Regents Park. That was £13 a week and I worked there for four years, looking after the rose gardens.
I’ve always loved the gardening but there was so little money in it and eventually I got some classes to learn to be an electrician and that’s how I ended up working for the Post Office, all over the City of London.
My Gran was a real Bible reader, who prayed a lot, but for me it wasn’t until my twenties that faith came to mean something deeper, when I understood about Jesus dying and about how we’re forgiven.
When I first came to St Luke’s, there was a Deaconess, Patsy, living in the vicarage while Tim, the vicar, lived up near me in the flat above St Francis on North Road. Then there was only a handful of us in services, we used to start the hymns with a tape-recorder.
Tim organized a day to work in the garden and I said that I’d do this area over by the front wall. He looked at me with a smile and said, ‘You can do more if you like!’ I did end up doing more. I’ve been doing it ever since. I just like looking after the gardens, I enjoy it. To me, being close to nature, can be like being close to God, like in the best gardens you have this serene state, this peaceful state. I remember when I first when to Iona, I heard it described as a thin place, where the distance between earth and heaven is not much. A few times I’ve been in the garden of St Luke’s and felt it is also a thin place.
Sometimes people want to pray in the church: one woman, who couldn’t speak English, would only go as far as the doorway, no further – she just stood there. And I asked God to grant her whatever she was praying for.
We used to have a Bible Study and we had home groups. Why they petered out I don’t know.We used to sit and debate, although that got a bit iffy sometimes if you ask me.
If this church wasn’t here I’d miss it. It’s like someone who’s been married for thirty years, you might have some arguments but if they were gone you’d miss them.
I like being with the earth and watching God send the sun and the rain and then seeing how everything grows. Sometimes I just like to look at the roses and marvel at them.’
The Gospel According to Sam is one of 12 stories collected in The Gospel According to Everyone by Martin Wroe.
Harvest at St Luke's
This Sunday morning we will be celebrating harvest. We invite you to bring toiletries for the Night Shelter (preferably of the mini variety). The SoulSpace service at 7pm will also centre on the harvest theme with a simple harvest supper (veg chilli - cooked by Dave's fair hand!) interspersed with the usual SoulSpace style prayers, music and films. Newcomers to SS very welcome.
Speakeasy 5
Sunday School kids say "Thanks"
On the sunday just gone, kids and adults thought about how to say thanks in different languages. Quite surprising how many we got to!
SteepleJack Sessions
An evening of musical wonderment curated by our very own Iain Archer. Steeplejacks began with the aim of putting some particularly fine voices in a particularly fine setting; creating an edifying mix of almost undiscovered artists in this lovingly refurbished Victorian church in North London. Steeplejacks is a collective of musicians, djs, writers and artists based at St Luke’s in Holloway aiming to produce a regularish evening of musical wonderment for your pleasure. Imagine the loveliest of songs, performed in the place with a steeple, along with a warm welcome and a cold beer and you’ve got it. This time featuring a stellar lineup including Luke Sital-Sing, Foreign Slippers, Boxes and the big man himself - Iain Archer.
Tickets £10 and £5 conc. are available on the door or online at eventbrite.
A Poem for Tyler
A gorgeous little boy called Tyler with a smile that could melt the polar ice caps was baptised at St Luke's on Sunday. His mum Louise wrote a poem that she asked Dave to read out in the service. She refers to Tyler as a rainbow child - a baby born to a family after the loss of a child, a blessing after the storm. Many people wanted a copy of the poem, so here it is:
FOR TYLER
In life things happen that are beyond our control,
Devastating things that rip out your heart and soul.
But luckily in life we have something called hope,
God sent this perfect rainbow child to help us to cope.
It was hard at times as we were still trying to mourn,
A precious life was taken so this rainbow child could be born.
I can still picture the day when my rainbow child was delivered,
For that day my body ran so cold and it shivered.
My eyes filled with happy tears, a new day had finally came,
A beautiful baby was handed to me and Tyler was his name.
Lord we thank you for blessing us with this beautiful little boy,
A true blessing from above who brings us so much joy.
He has made our life complete and has shown us wonderful things,
For we didn’t know just how much happiness a child could bring.
The years are flying by but everyday we happily smile,
As watching him grow are precious moments that are worthwhile.
His beautiful brown eyes filled with innocence and love,
His soul so peaceful it resembles a pure white dove.
His smile so charming he can do no wrong,
The bond between mother and son that feels so strong.
A mother’s love for her child is something no one can explain,
It’s made of deep devotion and of sacrifice and pain.
It is endless and unselfish and endearing come what may,
For nothing can destroy it or take that love away.
The Gospel of Adrian
It’s been said that ‘The Church is the Fifth Gospel’ and in our services we sometimes include an extra Gospel reading – from the Gospel of this Church. On Sunday March 4th we heard The Gospel According To Adrian, who thought he was going to become a priest. But was wrong. 'When I was young I was sure I was going to be a priest. In fact in my teenage years I couldn’t think of anything more wonderful to do with my life.
That might seem a little odd when you learn I’m from a poor, working class family in Newcastle. My mates only ever thought of football. My brother, for example, he was one of the lads but I was never one of the lads. I was an avid reader and our school had a fantastic library which I just read my way through. I especially loved poetry and my favourite Aunt, Nellie, introduced me to opera and classical music. A family friend even took me to the ballet.
I knew there was something different about me to everyone else in the family. I had this feeling that I would have to get out and get away.
With my mother being a devout Catholic, I also really loved church and the drama of serving as an altar boy. Someone mentioned I might like to visit this Catholic Fayre in Newcastle where all the monasteries and religious orders were getting together. That’s where I came across the Passionists, who had this wonderful junior seminary, Blythe Hall, 120 miles away in Ormskirk. The photographs of this beautiful C16th mansion in its own grounds, were so unbelievable compared to where we lived that it seemed almost too good to be true that a boy could go there and be trained as a priest.
My mother was over the moon when I passed the exams. I was her favourite and there was nothing she could want more than for me to become a priest. My dad was less keen. He’d always been suspicious of me. Why was I always in a book? Why did I want to go to the ballet ? Given this was the 1950’s and I was so fond of the arts, I think he’d earmarked me as a homosexual. What else would you think in those days ? I’m sure he was glad to see the back of me.
For six wonderful years I was taught by these bright, university-educated Passionists. I was the sacristan, I did all the flowers, I was in the choir, I loved the gardening, the football, the cricket. I loved the books and I loved all the other boys. Pete Postlethwaite was one of my friends, plucked, like me, from working class obscurity. The two of us were in all the plays together. The heroic Father Aidan, our English Master, used to write a brilliant Christmas pantomime and one year we were the ugly sisters. In fact I think I played women the entire time I was there.
I was very devout. I was in church every morning and I loved Holy Week because there were so many services. We all knew we were going to be priests and I saw a fantastic life ahead of me full of gardening and reading in the week with a bit of singing and doing communion on Sundays. Perhaps some stamp-collecting on the side. That’s how I thought of it.
But as I got older, a problem emerged. Girls. They started to look more and more attractive and I began to doubt that I could live a celibate life. It was after leaving Blythe Hall, on the night before I was due to start seminary and train as a priest, that everything changed. I was staying in a Worcestershire village with Auntie Nell. I was serving in the village petrol station that they ran as the late summer sun was falling over the hills, when walking down the road towards me came the most extraordinary vision. Jenny Proctor was a peroxide blonde in a polka dot dress and petticoat. Without thinking twice I abandoned the petrol pump and walked with her, right up to the top of Snows Hill where the view took in seventeen counties. We lay down, side by side, on the grass and talked all evening until the stars were twinkling in the dark sky above us.
I never laid a hand on her but when I got back to Nell’s I knew I wasn’t going to seminary the next day. I knew I wasn’t going to be a priest. Nell insisted I rang my mother who told me not to bother coming home again.
But discovering the priesthood wasn’t for me started me on the path to discovering what was. I had a job with Dunlop and when I was transferred south I got in to AmDram and then, another lucky break, a part in Treasure Island at Birmingham Rep, while I was in my first year at Drama School. After that you couldn’t stop me. I learned everything I could about theatre and I could do a lot of things quite well: I could sing, I could dance, I could act. I could do Shakespeare or comedy. Before I’d stopped to catch my breath I was in London, it was the swinging 60’s and I was starring in Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap at The Ambassadors in the West End.
Being an actor and then director in London in the sixties and seventies wasn’t really compatible with churchgoing. I fell by the wayside as the Catholics would say. I didn’t go to confession because the priest would tell me to stop doing so much partying… but I couldn’t. I stopped going to church instead. Not that I was closed down spiritually, not even in my wildest days. I was active in politics, in demos, campaigning - maybe social justice was how my faith was expressed then. The trouble with being a Catholic is that you can stop going to Church, but you can never really stop being Catholic. Sometimes I’d just drop into a church and sit there. I was always so moved by these places.
By my mid-forties I was having a ball, living in my Highgate flat, earning good money, directing documentaries and commercials. There were any number of girlfriends but never that special person. I was sometimes a little sad thinking I’d never met the one special person, that the time for having a family had passed. But then I had to pitch a script to this very attractive, high-powered, woman running her own company. She was quite different to the other women I’d been drawn to - not least because she wouldn’t let me get my own way. Twenty five years later I still can’t get my own way with Bridg and I wouldn’t have it any other way. She changed my life again and gave me two wonderful children, the family I never thought I’d have.
The strange thing is that for nine years we lived three minutes from St Luke’s without ever going in but when Ellie and Luke came along there was a school we wanted which insisted on a religious connection. They didn’t care what kind so we thought maybe even that church up the road might do. Malcolm Doney was preaching on our first morning and I remember after the Bible reading he said, ‘Well that doesn’t make any sense does it?’ That was it for me. This was my kind of church, where people can admit that sometimes even the Bible seems odd. The people were so friendly too. We never left. That was ten years ago.
Finding St Luke’s was like coming home, like completing an arc in my life, coming back to Church after all that time. But this time I’d found a community where I could be more honest about faith, where religion wasn’t about guilt but more about supporting each other, not about heavy doctrines but about friendship. I’d always loved the singing and drama of church but less so the catechism but here you don’t have to worry if you have all the right beliefs. It’s helped me find faith in a new way and it’s hard to imagine how that might have happened anywhere else.
People always tell me I’ve been lucky in my life, that I’ve had a lot of really good breaks and it’s true but I’d rather use the word blessing. Even though I wasn’t cut out for the priesthood, I’ve always felt someone was clearing a path for me through life, I’ve always felt blessed, that maybe God has travelled with me, even when I wasn’t aware of it.'
More like this in The Gospel According to Everyone.