Blessings

Ours is a mixed house in more ways than one. For the purpose of this posting its about faith and in particular the challenges of being an Anglican married to a Roman Catholic and reconciling what appears to be the irreconcilable. Our children were baptised Roman Catholics, attended a Roman Catholic school, took their first holy communion at the local Roman Catholic church and in time were confirmed there too. To say that their attendance since has been a tad more erratic would be an understatement. But I have never thought ours was anything but the right decision.

And as a couple in spite of a good deal of mutual accommodation the fact of the matter is that we have always sensed that barriers existed. Some of them we might have put there in our minds but it is no more than reality that an Anglican like myself does not take holy communion in a Roman Catholic church. So whilst the church and its people in both churches have always been very welcoming there is always a slight sense of one of us standing outside the community.

On Tuesday the Holy Father's generous offer of full Communion for disaffected Anglicans may have opened the door for a coming together that I could scarcely have dreamed of even a few months ago. As an Anglo-Catholic I think the advice that we make this a time of quiet reflection and prayer to be the right one. But right now the positives seem to be safely outweighing the negatives.

And by the happiest of coincidences last night we were visited by Fr.Ivan as part of a Programme of Parish Visits with the theme of A Wave of Prayer. Fr.Ivan brought with him an icon of Our Lady which remains with us until it is passed on, like a relay baton to the next visit, creating a wave of prayer across the parish. So it was for a wonderful couple of hours Roman Catholic and Anglican were in the same place, our home blessed both by prayer and a sense that a divide may be coming down. Think globally, act locally is maxim used a lot in the business world. For a while last night the two came together.