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Light of the North: The magazine of the Diocese of Aberdeen

 

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DIOCESE

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A Letter from Bishop Hugh Gilbert OSB

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Christmas is coming, and there seem to be so many of them. Christmas means so many different things and, for some, nothing at all. There is a whole spectrum. There is a retail Christmas, always very evident, which seems to begin once Halloween is over – certainly well before Advent. It’s the Christmas of shopping, luring us in. Relentless entertainment is another version or just plain over-indulgence. Then we might think of the Christmas of those who are ill, in hospital perhaps, or in care homes. How a simple piece of bad news can crash our Christmas! Or, given current events, what will Christmas be like for Christians and non-Christians in Gaza? What will it be like for hostages and prisoners? Or for soldiers on frontlines in Ukraine and elsewhere? And so on. Are there as many Christmasses as people?

 

 

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DIOCESE

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St. Joseph's Catholic Primary School, Inverness, celebrates its 80th birthday

We had a whole week full of celebrations to celebrate our 80th year in this school building. As Father Laurence Gambella wrote in his weekly bulletin, we are not really celebrating a building, we celebrate everything that is encompassed within the building, everything we value and work hard for as a school community of faith and learning. We celebrate our core values of respect, honesty, care and determination and it is wonderful to take a step back and feel proud of our school community from the past, to the present and onwards to our future. Christine, one of our P7 pupils said, “I was excited about all the events we got to experience in the week of celebrations. I am proud of my school, St Joseph’s, and I think it is great that it is still doing so well even at 80 years old!”

 

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EDUCATION AND FORMATION

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Preparing for the Lord

“Almighty and merciful God,
May no earthly undertaking hinder those
who set out in haste to meet your Son,
but may our learning of heavenly wisdom
gain us admittance to his company.”
(Opening Prayer Advent Sunday B).

In Advent we are urged to prepare to greet the Lord with joy and open, welcoming hearts – to meet him and share his life through the sacraments, gifted to us through that first coming in the flesh; but especially to be ready for him when he comes again in glory. Not only must we remain watchful, but we must make ourselves ready, worthy to greet our Lord’s triumphant return when he will gather us to himself.

 

 

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Latest Issue of the Light of the North ...

 

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A Letter from Bishop Hugh Gilbert OSB

Bishop Hugh 2.jpg

 

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Christmas is coming, and there seem to be so many of them. Christmas means so many different things and, for some, nothing at all. There is a whole spectrum. There is a retail Christmas, always very evident, which seems to begin once Halloween is over – certainly well before Advent. It’s the Christmas of shopping, luring us in. Relentless entertainment is another version or just plain over-indulgence. Then we might think of the Christmas of those who are ill, in hospital perhaps, or in care homes. How a simple piece of bad news can crash our Christmas! Or, given current events, what will Christmas be like for Christians and non-Christians in Gaza? What will it be like for hostages and prisoners? Or for soldiers on frontlines in Ukraine and elsewhere? And so on. Are there as many Christmasses as people?

And what might a Christian Christmas be? Family and friends, please God, the flowing bowl and the full plate, and the joys of being together round a table. The Christmas of carols and gifts and children enchanted. The Christmas of our liturgies, drawing us in to the Gospel story: the Christmas of Mary and Joseph, shepherds and wise men, under the gaze of angels and a star: the gift of the Father wrapped up as a Child in a manger. The long waiting of prophecy fulfilled. This is the Christmas of faith and hope, of new beginnings, an inoculation of courage against the disease of despair.

There is another strand in our tradition too. It echoes in the old familiars like Good King Wenceslas and Dickens’ story of Scrooge. It is the Christmas of charity. It will be dear to the heart of Pope Francis. The Christmas of mercy, and its corporal and spiritual works. Of hospitality. Of aid. Of outreach. Of simple kindness. The light of love in darkness. We are blessed as Catholics to have SCIAF, the Scottish arm of Caritas Internationalis; Mary’s Meals; and in many parishes the Society of St Vincent de Paul and in and around our Cathedral the work for the homeless of the Holy Family Sisters of the Needy – not to mention so many worthy charities and initiatives, Christian and otherwise.

God’s Christmas, we might venture, was the opening of his heart. It wasn’t just Mary who gave birth at Christmas. It was, grounding that, God the Father himself. And we are re-born when our heart opens. Merciful action to our neighbour is a sign we are becoming children of our heavenly Father. The best sign, indeed, of a “good Christmas”. I wish it to us all.

Yours in Christ,

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St. Joseph's Catholic Primary School, Inverness, celebrates its 80th birthday

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We had a whole week full of celebrations to celebrate our 80th year in this school building. As Father Laurence Gambella wrote in his weekly bulletin, we are not really celebrating a building, we celebrate everything that is encompassed within the building, everything we value and work hard for as a school community of faith and learning. We celebrate our core values of respect, honesty, care and determination and it is wonderful to take a step back and feel proud of our school community from the past, to the present and onwards to our future. Christine, one of our P7 pupils said, “I was excited about all the events we got to experience in the week of celebrations. I am proud of my school, St Joseph’s, and I think it is great that it is still doing so well even at 80 years old!”

The pupils have had the chance to experience history first-hand throughout our preparations for our celebrations. It has provided a wonderful real life context for learning. You can see some examples of literacy and artwork that our pupils have enjoyed creating. Primary six drew portraits of all current staff members and quizzed passers by if they could identify staff from their artwork. Primary six also wrote about what a day in St Joseph’s might be like in 2103, in another 80 years. 80 years is an ‘oak’ celebration so the whole school created an oak tree with comments. P2/3 wrote a recipe for what makes a St Joseph’s cake a brilliant cake. The recipe includes ‘700g of sharing, 0g of fighting and 707 handfuls of love.’ Primary seven used their Chromebooks to create some examples of information leaflets using digital and literacy skills. P5 looked at the history of the school building and staff. All pupils got the chance to see extracts from the archived logbooks of the school dating back as far as 1873!

Our whole school community including past staff, pupils and parents gathered for a celebration Mass on Wednesday 4th October 2023. It was so special for so many of the priests from the Deanery supporting our school and concelebrating the Mass alongside Father Laurence and Father Justin. The Mass was then followed by an open afternoon where the wider St Joseph’s family could come along and look at the children’s brilliant work on display and also to look at photos and archives from the past. It was very special to speak with so many people about their fond memories of their time at St Joseph’s and the one thing that shone through strongly is that feeling of ‘family’ and ‘belonging’. We have started our own logbook and we hope that in years to come, people will look back at what has been written in this year 2023.

What a week we had! Drumming, banquet, ice cream van, dance workshops! We also had guest speakers coming to share their experiences including Derek Martin, Care and Learning Manager for the Mid Highland area and Christine Cameron, past head teacher. Past pupils and staff sent videos to the children to share what St Joseph’s was like when they were in school.

All in all, we feel incredibly blessed to work in such a successful, kind school. When we do something we love, work is full of joy and in a school such as ours and with our pupils and families, it is an absolute pleasure!

BY HESTER McMILLAN

 

 

Preparing for the Lord

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“Almighty and merciful God,
May no earthly undertaking hinder those
who set out in haste to meet your Son,
but may our learning of heavenly wisdom
gain us admittance to his company.”
(Opening Prayer Advent Sunday B).

In Advent we are urged to prepare to greet the Lord with joy and open, welcoming hearts – to meet him and share his life through the sacraments, gifted to us through that first coming in the flesh; but especially to be ready for him when he comes again in glory. Not only must we remain watchful, but we must make                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       ourselves ready, worthy to greet our Lord’s triumphant return when he will gather us to himself.

“O People of Zion, behold, the Lord will come to save all nations, and the Lord will make the glory of his voice heard in the joy of your hearts” (Is 30:19,30).

The Prophet Isaiah offers words of consolation from God to His people who have for so long been pining in darkness, yearning to go home and to know their Father’s tender care once again. He describes the coming of the Lord in triumph in royal terms: “Prepare in the wilderness a way for the Lord. Make a straight highway … Let every valley be filled in…” In Isaiah’s world, when a king was expected to visit his subjects, they would indeed repair the roads to make his progress easier: level hills and fill in potholes. In our turn, we have to prepare ourselves to be open to the Lord; to fill in the holes of indifference or neglect; to remove the mounds of sin, of greed, of envy, of intolerance: of anything that might set up an obstacle in the path of the Lord into our lives and into our hearts. Then we shall be fit and ready to greet our divine King when he arrives in all His glory.

“Shout with a loud voice,
joyful messenger to Jerusalem.
Shout without fear,
say to the towns of Judah,
Here is your God.”

This expectation of the coming of the Lord in glory should evoke intense joy in us, not fear, for the One we are eagerly awaiting is our Saviour, the God who has loved us with an everlasting love; the God who suffered and died for us; the God who rose from the dead to show us our way into the Kingdom of Heaven. What is there to fear? All we have to do is “lead lives without spot or stain” and keep vigil.

“He is like a shepherd feeding his flock,
gathering lambs in his arms,
holding them against his breast
and leading to their rest the mother ewes.”

Isaiah, whose lips an angel touched with divine fire at the beginning of his mission, offers us such beautiful, strengthening images. This is what we can look forward to: not annihilation, not uncaring tyranny, but to be gathered up into the arms of our Lord and tenderly carried to our eternal rest and beatitude.

“The Day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then with a roar the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and fall apart, the earth and all that it contains will be burnt up.”
Scary words! Peter, we recall, was appointed shepherd of the Lord’s flock, told to “Feed my sheep!” But he would be failing in his task if he did not warn us to stay vigilant. Peter, like his fellow apostles, had grown to love Jesus as friend and brother; it is natural that he was longing for his Lord to return, that they would be reunited in the flesh, even in the knowledge that this would mean the end of all earthly things. To see at last the Beloved’s face shining before us – surely this is to be desired most devoutly? For, “What we are waiting for is what he promised: the new heavens and new earth, the place where righteousness will be at home.”
As a caring shepherd, Peter’s concern is to remind us that this renewal requires a renewal within ourselves. Our Father, in his great love for us and his desire that none of his children should be lost, gives us this chance during our Advent vigil, to practise living “holy and saintly lives while [we] wait and long for the Day of God to come”. We must also practise patience. Like children, we may grow more and more eager for the longed-for day to arrive; but Peter reminds us that “with the Lord, ‘a day’ can mean a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day”. Let us try to live in God’s time and fervently desire to be prepared when that day comes.
A voice cries in the wilderness… John the Baptist is not at all what we might imagine a royal herald to be. He has been preparing himself in the desert for his work, dressed like a prophet in rough camel hair skins and eating the sparse diet of a prophet. In repeating the words of his predecessor Isaiah, John proclaims the fulfilment of that prophecy. His message of the Good News is our call to conversion and the joyful possibility of meeting the Lord when he comes to seek us. John’s destiny since his birth has been to call for a baptism of repentance and the conversion of lives.

“You shall be called a prophet of God, the Most High.
You shall go ahead of the Lord,
to prepare his ways before him,
to make known to his people their salvation
through forgiveness of all their sins,
the loving-kindness of the heart of our God
who visits us like the dawn from on high” (Benedictus).

“God’s presence has already begun and we, the believers, are the ones through whom he desires to be present in the world. Through our faith, hope and love he desires to shine His light ever anew into the night of this world. The lights we kindle during the dark nights of this wintertime are therefore both a consolation and a reminder: the consoling assurance that ‘the Light of the world’ has already appeared in the darkness of the night in Bethlehem and has changed the unholy night of human sin into the holy night of divine forgiveness for this sin” (J. Ratzinger).
Just as the First Coming of the Lord in the flesh two thousand years ago heralded a new dawn which brought light to those languishing in darkness, so the Second Coming for which we pray during this season will bring the dawning of an everlasting day, of a light that will never die, and a joy that will sing in our hearts for eternity. For, those who are redeemed in the blood of the Lamb and strive to live lives worthy of Him “will see the Lord face to face, and His name will be written on their foreheads. It will never be night again and they will not need lamplight or sunlight, because the Lord God will be shining on them. They will reign for ever and ever” (Rev 22:4-5). Maranatha – O Lord, come!

 

BY EILEEN CLARE GRANT