Morning Prayer video link uploaded on time, then breakfast and a walk down to St John's to celebrate the Eucharist in honour of Saint Mary Magdalene, Apostle to the Apostles at St John's with nine others. This gave me an opportunity to reflect on the idea of penitence as continual striving to see the world as God sees it, not as we'd like it to be or think it is. For so many centuries the church, despite Jesus' radically different attitude of woman has gone in a different direction, unable to break habitual ways of seeing them as either inferior or threatening in some way, condoning violence against them and exploitation. It doesn't fit with the vision of God's kingdom Jesus called us to embrace. We may be starting to see things in a different light, this past century or so, but there is still a long way to go before radical change touches the lives of hundreds of millions forced by male attitudes into inequality and servitude.
The church's celebration of Mary Magdalene now highlights the role she received from the risen Jesus, but when I was young she was still regarded as the 'fallen woman' whom Jesus rescued from condemnation, to be one of his disciples, eternally penitent, sorry for what she had been. Well, there's no biblical basis for conflating stories about women into one personage. Mary helped fund Jesus' missionary travels, a woman of some social status for nobody to mind her moving about in the men's realm. Jesus is said to have healed her of seven demons - to be demonised is to be distressed and torn apart by conflicting experiences and emotions. That's understandable if you live in a word where attitudes and expectations towards you are radically different from the way you see yourself. Following Jesus set her free to be her wholesome self and not bother about other people's negativity towards her.
Just before lunch Clare received a message to say that Carole Winters, a St Catherine's Choir member died last night. She had a terrible stroke some years ago and made a valiant effort to recover and remain living alone in her own house, but then, several months ago she had a fall and another stroke which weakened her even further and left her bed ridden, so she moved a few weeks ago into a nursing home in Penarth. The extreme heat at the moment may have been a contributory factor to hastening her end. Church friends have been very supportive and encouraging to her all this time she's been hospitalised and housebound by covid as much as anything else, but they will miss her now in a different way. May she rest in peace.
While I was walking along the west bank of the Taff, I took photos of kids jumping from tree branches into the river on the other bank, thirty metres away using the Olympus OMD's burst mode setting as an experiment. I wasn't much pleased with the result I got with my long lens. The images would have been sharper with the camera on a tripod, or at closer range with another lens. I made the two 'burst' groups of photos into little animations and posted them on Instagram, to see if it the process worked. Recently I've been learning how to use the great range of settings this camera has available, and how these can be used in different situations. Somehow the Olympus feels less intimidating than my Sony DSLR when it comes to making good use of different settings. But then Sony's camera menus are notoriously difficult to get to grips with, decidedly user unfriendly.
I settled down to watch telly in the evening but there wasn't anything to hold my attention following an early programme about key features on the Cornish coast path. Cornwall was our first summer holiday outing as a couple in 1964. We returned once to camp at Tintagel when the kids were small, but haven't been back in forty years, seduced as we were by camping holidays in France thereafter, by the desire for sunny weather. Now it seems we're getting more than out fair share of warmth on our own doorstep.
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