Northumbria Community Resources & Teaching

This downloadable pdf contains the Finan daily readings from CDP1 (The Journey Begins) for the month of October: Parting and Planting.   When you complete your purchase, you will receive an email with a link (CDP1_dailyreadings_Finan_October.pdf) to download your pdf.  The link will expire in 3 days, although we imagine you will have downloaded it long before then!

This downloadable pdf contains the Colman daily readings from CDP2 (Further Up and Further In) for the month of August. In the World This month of readings seeks to help us push past the artificial divide between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul, and move, as Barbara Brown Taylor says, towards "trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world". later this month we will hear from Charles Ringma, but we begin with excerpts from An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor.  Here are some words from her introduction: Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it. So welcome to your own priesthood, practised at the altar of your own life. The good news is that you have everything you need to begin. When you complete your purchase, you will receive an email with a link (CDP2_dailyreadings_Colman_August.pdf) to download your pdf.  The link will expire in 3 days, although we imagine you will have downloaded it long before then!

This downloadable pdf contains the Colman daily readings from CDP2 (Further Up and Further In) for the month of January. Monastic Diseases: Monastic diseases are coping mechanisms - attitudes and actions that can bring dis-ease to ourselves and to others around us.  All of us have the potential to catch any and all of the diseases - the main problem lies in denial or wrong diagnosis or no diagnosis at all, i.e. being unaware of them.  Monastic diseases are closely related to the logismoi, those repetitive thoughts and preoccupations that can distract us from the spiritual path, and which inflame the inner monsters of our negative memories, moods and secrets triggered by all sorts of people, issues and situations, as well as our desire for comfort and consolation; all of which find expression in false expectations and unrealistic ambitions which are basically egotistical. There is so much in us of anger, aggression, selfishness, hurt, deception and damage that can only be rooted out by patient, faithful loving commitment to seeing God and knowing self, our limitations, boundaries and weaknesses, for only then can we deal with them.  When you complete your purchase, you will receive an email with a link (CDP2_dailyreadings_Colman_January.pdf) to download your pdf.  The link will expire in 3 days, although we imagine you will have downloaded it long before then!

This downloadable pdf contains the Colman daily readings from CDP2 (Further Up and Further In) for the month of November. Living The Questions: One of our heart-felt convictions as a Community is that each of us should learn to ‘embrace the Heretical Imperative’, to question everything boldly in order to understand something deeper about who God is, who we are, and what our purpose is in the work of God in the world, alone and together. Some truth can only be found, fought for, and embraced by asking questions. When we are faced with the reality of lives that are complex, messy and full of paradox, in the context of a rapidly changing world, quick answers are often at best unhelpful. If we choose a different approach, we find ourselves living the questions. This month of daily readings is a collection of questions, thoughts, and provocations that reflect something of life back to us and urge us to ponder our spiritual awakening and growth.   When you complete your purchase, you will receive an email with a link (CDP2_dailyreadings_Colman_November.pdf) to download your pdf.  The link will expire in 3 days, although we imagine you will have downloaded it long before then!

This downloadable pdf contains the Eata daily readings from CDP2 (Further Up and Further In) for the month of December. Deeper Magic This month's readings are taken from the works of George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle. George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a Scottish author, poet and Christian minister. His writings, which draw deeply on the indigenous spirituality of the pre-clearance Highlands and folk memory of the people, have been cited as a major literary influence by many notable authors.  C.S. Lewis once said "I have never concealed the fact that I regarded George MacDonald as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him." Madeleine L'Engle says " Surely George MacDonald is the grandfather of us all - all of us who struggle to come to terms with truth through fantasy."  Like MacDonald, C.S. Lewis applies his heart, brilliance and imagination to the task of opening another world to us so that we may never look at the inside of a wardrobe in the same way again. As we move, in the middle of this month, from the writings of MacDonald to those of Lewis, our adventures in Narnia awaken in us a deeper homesickness that energises rather than discourages as it bids us to come "farther up and farther in"! When you complete your purchase, you will receive an email with a link to download your pdf.  The link will expire in 3 days, although we imagine you will have downloaded it long before then!

This is a downloadable pdf of the booklet "City without a Church" by Henry Drummond, which has been produced as one in a series of booklets exploring responses to one of the basic questions of the Northumbria Community: "How Then Shall We Live?" The city without a church The City Without a Church is a meditation by Henry Drummond on a selection of verses from Revelation chapters 21 (verses 2 and 22) and 22 (verses 2 and 3). Extracts from it feature in the Finan series of readings for July in Celtic Daily Prayer and it has become an important text for the Northumbria Community because it deals with ‘church without walls’ and ‘kingdom in the streets’. Although this meditation is framed in the muscular, self-confident language of the Victorian era, its underlying message to us is as fresh as if it was written yesterday. The message is this: the institutional churches have ‘stolen Christ from the people’. What struck Drummond about John’s vision of the New Jerusalem was not just that he saw a city (rather than some kind of pastoral idyll) but that he saw no temple (or church) there. Although Drummond has hard words for the institutional church, he is by no means anti-church: he just wants it to wake up to the realities of real faith and get its priorities right. For Drummond, this involves getting out of our church buildings and getting totally involved in the concrete realities of our streets − starting right where we are, with the mess of real life all around us. He says that ‘it is only because the secular is so intensely sacred that so many eyes are blind before it.’ When you complete your purchase, you will receive an email with a link to download your pdf.  The link will expire in 3 days, although we imagine you will have downloaded it long before then!