🍁 Autumn 2026 Newsletter 🍁

Greetings friends,

I can’t believe it’s Easter in just a couple of weeks!

Watching the news each day, so much has already happened in just the first few months of this year that is disquieting! We live in interesting times! Values we thought were nailed down have come loose. Institutions that were trusted are no longer trusted.  

The economic and political and religious systems we kind of assumed would also be the scaffolding for our lives are looking  shaky. There are so many disruptive forces at play, and we do not know what the landscape will look like when the dust settles.

The hope of Easter is the foundational belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which signifies victory over death, sin, and despair. For Christians, it is this "living hope” (1 Peter 1:3) that provides the assurance of new life and the power for transformation in the present, regardless of the turmoil that we see. 

The Easter message is as fresh and pertinent as it ever was!

We’ve attached a short news-letter to give you bit of an update: HERE

We want to say a huge thankyou to the many who encourage, support and pray for us and for Haven — You are SO appreciated! 

Sincerely,

M & E

Dona Nobis Pacem | Grant Us Peace

 

Lenten Prayer

Revise our taking

You, You giver!
You have given light and life to the world;
You have given freedom from Pharaoh to your people Israel;
You have given your only Son for the sake of the world;
You have given yourself to us;
You have given and forgiven,
and you remember our sins no more.

And we, in response, are takers:
We take eagerly what you give us;
we take from our neighbors near at hand as is acceptable;
we take from our unseen neighbors greedily and acquisitively;
we take from our weak neighbors thoughtlessly;
we take all that we can lay our hands on.

It dawns on us that our taking does not match your giving.
In this Lenten season revise our taking,
that it may be grateful and disciplined
even as you give in was generous and overwhelming.
Amen

Walter Brueggemann, Awed to Heaven Rooted in Earth (153-154).

Lent: The Writing’s On The Wall | Deborah Conway & Willy Zygier

"It’s the cliché that means everybody else knows but you, you’ve been blind to the bleeding obvious. The phrase originates from an episode in the Old Testament, Book of Daniel, where the Babylonian King Belshazzar was entertaining his courtiers on the eve of battle, getting drunk from cups stolen from the Temple in Jerusalem, instead of being with his troops."

"The hand of G-d appeared and proceeded to write on the wall, words of judgement about not measuring up to expectations. Belshazzar was dead by dawn. He never saw it coming. 

None of us see it coming..." (Deborah Conway & Willy Zygier).

What are the certainties that weigh us down? What are the illusions and assumptions that immobilise and paralyse us until too late?

Marcel Proust said: "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes."  

   (Click pic to play song...)

Hannah Arendt quote

Written in 1951, and reflecting on the rise of Nazi Germany andStalinist Russia:

"...  In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... 

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. 

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” 

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Published in 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism is Hannah Arendt's landmark analysis of the conditions that birthed Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Arendt argues that totalitarianism is a "novel form of government" distinct from traditional dictatorships because it seeks total domination over every aspect of human life—including the inner thoughts of its subjects

T. S. Eliot's "Journey of The Magi"

'A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.'

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.