NEWS
Weather permitting, the sinking sun will illuminate the rood at the Autumn Equinox at approximately 5.50pm on September 22nd, 23rd and 24th.
Haymaking took place over four days in the week of 17th August. We are hugely appreciative of the industrious Community Payback team, which tackled the entire churchyard, including the thick jungle in the ‘plague pit area’ and the back wall. Many thanks to those who came to support the hard-working Community Payback team, and thanks especially to Chris for so kindly providing such greatly appreciated ploughman’s lunches each day.
Cheryl is grateful to those who helped at the two Love Box wrapping sessions. Love Boxes are now available for collection at the back of the church: do take one – or some – and fill them with small gifts destined for children in orphanages in Eastern Europe at Christmas. We are working with the charity T4U this year and once again we are grateful to Beccles Lions for paying for the transport. Leaflets are available to explain what to put in the boxes. Please return your boxes no earlier than mid-October and no later than Friday 23rd October. They will be blessed at Sunday service on 25th October.
Diana, Cheryl and Sarah contributed spectacular arrangements to the Mettingham Flower Festival, held at All Saints church over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Cheryl’s striking display for the 15th century octagonal font made for a fine welcome on arrival, Diana’s arrangement lit up the back of the south aisle with radiant colours (pictured, front page), and Sarah’s arrangements beautified the sanctuary.
The PCC met for routine business on Thursday 3rd September. The PCC is grateful to Peter Gasgoyne for his refurbishment of the porch bird-screen. The church bells have been serviced and Theo Wells has started work on various fabric repairsboth inside and outside the church.
Congratulations to Cheryl, David, Amy, Neville and Pat Smith whose efforts in the Ride & Stride event on Saturday 12th September raised approximately £1,000.00 in sponsorship, much of which will also attract Gift Aid. Thanks as well to the volunteers who manned the church to receive visitors at Barsham. The proceeds go to the Suffolk Historic Churches Trust, with half automatically allocated to Holy Trinity Barsham.
The 2027 Church Calendar produced by ChurchWarden Publications Ltd features a photo of Holy Trinity Barsham for the month of June. Cheryl will put a sample on display and orders can be made through her.
The August sales table, organised by Chris and including her gift tags, raised an impressive £165.00. The October sales table will be on Sunday 25th.
The Beccles Foodbank was grateful to receive 150 items from the Barsham congregation in August.
FORWARD PLANNING
Harvest Festival will take place on Sunday 27th September with Choral Evensong at 5.30pm and Harvest Supper in the village hall at 7pm. Our preacher is to be Canon Fr John Thackray, who is Vicar of St Mary at the Elms, Ipswich and Representative of the Bishop of Richborough.
Christmas Carol Service: 6.30pm, Monday 21st December with The Right Reverend Luke Irvine-Capel, Bishop of Richborough.
SNIPPETS – Flowers in Church
We are fortunate indeed at Barsham to enjoy such accomplished and beautiful flower arrangements for most of the year, and we appreciate the skill and dedication of our team of flower arrangers. But displaying decorative cut flowers in church is a relatively modern custom, only becoming acceptable in Anglican churches from the mid-19thcentury.
Flowers and greenery were used in the medieval church, though less for decoration and more usually for liturgical purposes, for instance on feast days, saints’ days and major festivals like Palm Sunday and Corpus Christi. Symbolic use of flowers and floral imagery was common too: five-petalled red flowers representing the five wounds of Christ, the iris representing the Trinity, the white lily and the rose representing the purity of the Virgin Mary, or a red rose representing Christ’s blood and martyrdom, and so on.
After the mid-16th century Reformation, the use of flowers and greenery in church was largely lost alongside other traditional visual forms of devotion such as lights (candles) and images. Flowers were not explicitly banned, but they were regarded by the reformers as unnecessary and frivolous, too much associated with Roman Catholicism and, at worse, a sensual snare – ‘a sinful fascination’.
It was only with the 19th century Anglo-Catholic Revival that flowers in church as we know them today started to become acceptable. The ‘ritualists’ of the Oxford Movement campaigned to re-introduce some pre-Reformation practices, pushing back on what they regarded as some of the greater excesses of hardline Protestantism, and this included the restoration of floral decoration. In similar vein, Anglo-Catholic church architects and decorative designers of the Cambridge Camden Society and the Ecclesiological Society were promoting a return to medieval forms in their work, including floral motifs. Meanwhile, a growing enthusiasm and fashion for cut flowers in the homes of the burgeoning middle classes drove a massive expansion of the commercial hothouse industry, making cut flowers widely available for the first time. However, the return of flowers to Anglican churches did not come without a struggle. The practice of decorating churches with cut flowers was fiercely resisted by the conservative Evangelical wing of the Anglican Church, which continued to regard it as morally dubious and too close to medieval Roman Catholicism. It was only after a series of court battles in the second half of the 19th century that the legality of floral decoration in church was accepted, albeit only on certain conditions, including a prohibition on placing them on the altar, and forbidding their use in any liturgical ritual.
October Diary
Sunday 4th October – Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP), Barsham. Revd Jonathan Olanczuk SSC.
Sunday 11th October – Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Canon John Fellows.
Sunday 18th October – Twentieth Sunday after Trinity. 11.15am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Desmond Banister SSC.
Sunday 25th October – Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Graham Naylor.
Church correspondent: Robert Bacon 07867 306016, [email protected]