From the Vicarage - March
March is when the clock Springs forward one hour. It happens during the
night hours, between the Saturday and Sunday of the final weekend of the
month. This year, that means that we will awake on the very last day of the
month – Sunday 31st March - to ‘a new time’!
We may also awake a little blurry eyed, having in effect lost an hour of
beauty sleep, unless we were really super sensible and managed to retire to
bed and get to sleep an hour earlier in preparation. For some that may be easier than
others, depending upon our own body clocks of wakefulness and sleepiness. Are you a
night owl, or a morning lark?
In preparation for what will, for some of us, be the other key feature of this March – Lent,
Holy Week and Easter - I have begun to read the Archbishop of Canterbury’s chosen Lent
book for 2024. It is in fact written by Selina Stone, who describes herself as an African
Caribbean woman raised in Birmingham with Jamaican ancestry. She also describes herself
as a black Christian whose faith and spirituality have been coloured and shaped by her
family heritage, her personal experience, and the particular contexts through which she has
moved. Her book is called “Tarry Awhile” drawing upon the words of Jesus in the Gospel
when he asked his sleepy friends in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before he died, to
“Watch and Pray” with him, or as some of the older texts say, to “Tarry Here...”
As the season of Lent reaches its climax that is very much what Holy Week is for. We enter
and ‘tarry awhile’ not just in the Garden of Gethsemane, but along the city streets of
Jerusalem (waving palm branches as Jesus enters the city), around a table in an upper room
(as Jesus breaks and offers us bread), in the courts of Pilate (as Jesus is accused, condemned
and handed over to be crucified) on the hillside of Calvary (as Jesus is nailed to a cross and
breathes his last) and at the garden tomb (where women bring their ointment and their
tears) …
At St Oswald’s, we are offering a range of opportunities for reflecting, praying and tarrying
awhile as we journey through this season - some of which this year will draw upon the
wisdom shared by Selina Stone. Each is an invitation and an encouragement to see
‘tarrying’ as something more powerfully entered into together.
Our moments of tarrying, of watching and waiting, of prayer and reflection
also carry the promise that as a community of faith, bleary eyed or not, we
shall this year greet 31st March with all the joy and celebration we can muster.
31st March is Easter Sunday - when together we enter ‘a new time’, and
Spring Forward into Resurrection Life!
With Love & Prayers for Lent, Holy Week & Easter.
Carolyn (Vicar)
Our full seasonal programme can be found elsewhere in the magazine or on weekly pew sheets @