Dear Friends

HOLY WEEK arrives the same way it always does: all at once, in the middle of everything. Easter plans to finalize. So many details that need attending: chocolate to buy; families to shepherd, and somewhere in the rush, the very story of the week can slip past us.

This is the time when sacred time and secular time cross. It can be seen in the calendars – the date of Easter hovers around like a hawk, diving to interrupt our calendar time anywhere between March and April, as the date is set to the full moon around the solar equinox, a date that refuses to be tamed to our solar tidiness.

Such untidiness causes us confusion, we want to organise holidays and schedules, but Easter refuses to conform. But we need that interruption, we need to be reminded that our tidy schedules are just our time, and we are part of eternal time as well. We are not made for tram schedules, but we are made for eternal life, life in the living God who made us, and even died for us. Easter asks us to interrupt our plans to consider how God has planned for us, planned by sending his Son to live and die for us so we can find our true selves.

This week is the culmination of the Church year – the great feasts of Good Friday and Easter open the heart of our faith, the life, death and life of Our Lord. I encourage you to explore these great days – we call them the triduum, the Latin phrase for the Three Days, the days that changed what it means to be a human, born into the world yet born to die, yet then promised eternal life through the three days of Our Lord.

New Archbishop of Canterbury

The new Archbishop Sarah Mullally was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury last Thursday. I have met the last three archbishops, and although some may come across as unimpressive in the media, when you meet them one-on-one, I easily understand why they are the leaders of the Anglican church – despite the arcane and complicated system of appointment, it does not produce dummies. The new archbishop, whom I have not met, is also showing that she is leader of insight and character. Before the service at Canterbury, she completed the six-day pilgrimage from London to Canterbury, in the steps of Chaucer’s motley pilgrims that he recounted so well. She was previously Bishop of London, and St Thomas Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury who was famously martyred in the Cathedral there in 1170 and whose Shrine, with that of Our Lady of Walsingham, became one of the greatest attractions in England.

St Thomas Becket’s pilgrimage from London to Canterbury, along the Thames and through the North Downs, was one of the most popular pilgrimage routes in mediaeval Britain. Although there have been signs of a resurgence of interest in pilgrimage in recent years, it’s nowhere near the scale of the popularity of the practice in the Middle Ages. It has been estimated that up to 100,000 pilgrims travelled to St Thomas Becket’s shrine in a single year during its peak, about three times the population of London at the time.

So, Archbishop Mullally was consciously walking in medieval footsteps, reviving the practice of “wandering to pilgrimages” that was explicitly banned by Thomas Cromwell in the English Reformation and has never fully recovered since. “I’m not the first archbishop who’s done it, I’m joining footsteps from the past,” she said, explaining that following St Thomas Becket’s path was a chance to reflect on her own ministry and journey from Bishop of London to Archbishop of Canterbury.

As the first woman Archbishop of Canterbury in a history that stretches back to St Augustine of Canterbury in 597 AD, the image of Mullally quietly getting on with it, walking persistently on her way through fog and shine, stopping to meet the locals and be received by religious communities and schoolchildren, powerfully communicated continuity amid change. She said the journey was a chance to “reflect on the diversity of the country – its different environments, different people”.

Pilgrimage necessarily involves an engagement with specificity, with the humble details of our embodied existence: changing landscapes, sore feet, strangers’ unexpected hospitality. This might explain why the practice of pilgrimage is so appealing again today, even to those who don’t identify with any particular faith. It’s a kind of spirituality that’s not lofty and abstract, but rooted in the local, in the water of holy wells, in legends of miracles worked by saints who once stood on the same soil, in the power of gathering to pray in a place where the stones have witnessed births, marriages and deaths for a thousand years. A thread of connection not only with the past but also with the earth itself. We don’t really have that in Australia, except perhaps in part in the great shrine churches like St George’s. I know that some of you have been on the great pilgrimage route in Spain, the Camino de Santiago, and tell of its power.

This kind of faith is also naturally ecumenical, seeking continuities rather than ruptures, more interested in embodied practice than in doctrinal division. At the service the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Richard Moth, read the lesson from the Old Testament and Archbishop Mullally wore the pastoral ring given to Archbishop Michael Ramsey in Rome by Pope Paul VI as a “symbol of the strong ties between Anglicans and Catholics.” (My thanks to the Tablet for the details and much of the wording about this pilgrimage.)

Vestry

Each year we have our annual vestry meeting, where the reports of the parish over the last year are given. This took place last Sunday, 29 March. Lyn Dutton was re-elected as people’s warden and Ranjan Ponniah was re-appointed as Rector’s Warden. My thanks to them both. Parish Council was not up for re-election so remains the same.

Easter Preparations

On Holy Saturday, 4 April, we will have the setting up of the church at 10 am – this is when we replace the banners and set up the altars with clean linen. All hands are welcome.

Parish Lunch

We had a lovely crowd for our Shrove Tuesday lunch at the Goodwood Park Hotel, with over twenty attending. Our next parish lunch will be for the Ascension, on Thursday 14 May at 1 pm.

St George’s Day

We will keep the Sunday after St George’s Day, being 26 April, as the parish celebration. Our guest preacher will be Fr Rodney Fopp, from St Barnabas’s College and the Diocese of the Murray. We shall have a shared meal afterwards.

In the meantime, I encourage you to make time for your prayer life during Lent. Prayer is always the foundation of any relationship with God – if you don’t listen to God then you will never discern the best way to live your life. Happiness is not about possessions or relationships; happiness is about being the child of God living the life for which you were created. That can only be discerned by prayer. So, get to it.

God Bless,

Fr Scott

HOLY WEEK & EASTER 2026

1 April Holy Wednesday

8.00 am Mass

9.00 pm Compline

2 APRIL MAUNDY THURSDAY

12 noon Mass

7.30 pm Solemn Mass

The Watch of the Passion will be kept until Midnight

3 APRIL GOOD FRIDAY

10.00 am Stations of the Cross

3.00 pm Mass of the Pre-Sanctified

5.00 pm Confessions

4 APRIL EASTER EVE

7 pm Vigil Mass

5 APRIL EASTER DAY

8.00 am Mass

10.00 am Solemn Sung Mass

History Photo

Our church always looks lovely with the flowers at Easter, so this issue I am showing you a photo of the high altar around the 1950s. This was before the installation of the crown, so one can see the coloured curtain behind the altar with the painting of the Flight into Egypt. The painting is now on the north wall of the church. The altar was also smaller – a new and larger altar was installed when the alterations took place in the 1970s with Fr Willoughby. The altar was vested with cloths, as is traditional, but the new altar was finely carved, and it was decided not to make new altar frontals. However, the tabernacle does not have the traditional veil over the front in this photo, which seems to have been the custom here during Fr Wise’s time. Instead, there is a metal door in front, showing the placing of Our Lord’s body in the tomb – we restored it a number of years ago, but it is only seen now on Good Friday. The altar cross has a carved wooden corpus on it – this was added in Fr Wise’s time and removed when we restored the cross to its original design of Thomas Lyon some years ago.

In front on the altar there is a hanging lamp – this was removed with the alterations and instead an oil lamp burns directly on top of the tabernacle.

Services

Sunday Services

8.00 am    Mass

10.00 am    Solemn Sung Mass

Weekday Services

Monday                       Fr Scott’s Day Off

Tuesday      10.00 am    Mass,

followed by gardening.

Wednesday   8.00 am    Mass

Thursday    12.00 noon Mass

Friday          8.00 am    Mass

Saturday       8.00 am    Mass

April

2       MAUNDY THURSDAY

3       GOOD FRIDAY

5       EASTER DAY

12       EASTER 2

16       Isabella Gilmore, deaconess, 1923

19       EASTER 3

20       The Annotine Easter 2025

21       Anselm, Abbot of Le Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, Teacher of the Faith, 1109

23       GEORGE, MARTYR, PATRON SAINT, c304

24       The Seven Martyrs of the Melanesian Brotherhood, Solomon Islands, 2003

25       ANZAC DAY

26       SUNDAY IN THE OCTAVE OF ST GEORGE

27       MARK, EVANGELIST AND MARTYR

28       Peter Chanel, Religious, missionary in the South Pacific, Martyr, 1841

29       Catherine of Siena, Mystic, Teacher, 1380

30       Pandita Mary Ramabai, Translator of the Scriptures, 1922

May

1       PHILIP AND JAMES, APOSTLES AND MARTYRS

2       Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, Teacher of the Faith, 373

3       EASTER 5

4       English Saints & Martyrs of the Reformation Era

8       Julian of Norwich, Mystic, Teacher, c1417

10       EASTER 6 – Rogation Sunday

11       Holy Abbots of Cluny

12       Gregory Dix, Priest, Monk, Scholar, 1952

17       ASCENSION

16       Caroline Chisholm, Social Reformer, 1877

19       Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, Restorer of Monastic Life, 988

20       Alcuin of York, Deacon, Abbot of Tours, 820

21       Helena, Protector of the Holy Places, 330

24       PENTECOST

25       The Venerable Bede, Priest, Monk at Jarrow, Scholar, Historian, 735

26       Augustine, First Archbishop of Canterbury, 605

26       John Calvin, Reformer, 1564

28       Lanfranc, Prior of Le Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1089

30       Joan of Arc, Visionary, 1431

30       Josephine Butler, Social Reformer, 1906

30       Apolo Kivebulaya, Priest, Evangelist in Central Africa, 1933

31       TRINITY SUNDAY

Address for correspondence

The Parish of St George the Martyr,

The Rectory

34 Angus Street

Goodwood, SA, 5034

Email: stgeorges8@bigpond.com

Consider giving to the church; our bank details are as follows.

For regular and general offerings:

Anglican Parish of St George the Martyr

BSB 105-033 Account 151 992 640

For mission offerings and special projects (e.g. Lent, disaster relief):

St Georges Association for Education

BSB 105-033 Account 151 259 040

You may donate anonymously, but please note a purpose – e.g. ‘regular offering’, ‘overseas mission’, ‘Lenten giving’.