Dear friends,
As autumn approaches, so our preparations for the events of the coming months pick up pace! Please stay after Mass this Sunday to a planning meeting for two important upcoming diary dates – namely, our St Leonard’s Day Mass and party (3 November), and our pre-Christmas Fair (23 November). We need everyone to play their part, to make these special occasions a success! Please see me if you wish to contribute towards the cost of the fireworks on St Leonard’s Day: approximately £190 remains to be covered.
It is likewise important that we support our sister parishes: this coming Sunday at 4.30pm we are invited to join our friends at St Andrew, Kingsbury for their Dedication Festival – at which the celebrant and guest preacher will be the Rt Rev’d Norman Banks, sometime Bishop of Richborough – and afterwards for a party in church.
Then, on Monday next week, 14 October, the Mayor of Harrow, Cllr Salim Chowdhury will be attending briefly at 3.40pm to lay a Remembrance wreath in our memorial garden. Do note that on Remembrance Sunday, 10 November, we will begin at the later time of 10.55am, in the memorial garden, with the Act of Remembrance, before a Sung Mass of Requiem for the Fallen.
Our first reading at Mass this Sunday observes that wisdom is to be preferred to power, wealth, health or beauty – because only by wisdom can things’ true value be discerned, above and beyond their worth or price. And yet so much of our lives’ activities appears dedicated to the pursuit of these lesser goods: our reading should therefore cause us to pause, and to re-evaluate our lives’ priorities.
Tickets (£17) for the Stanmore Choral Society “Feel the Spirit” concert in church on Saturday, 26 October at 7pm are now available online, here – or on the door, on the night. The Choral Society will be singing spiritual arrangements by Rutter, Burleigh and Price – as well as songs by Gershwin, and from Bernstein’s “West Side Story”.
There are now just two spaces remaining on our next Youth Group outing, to go trampolining at Harrow Leisure Centre on Saturday, 26 October: the cost is £10pp, to include refreshments. Please sign up in church, and collect and return a registration form.
Please continue to add names to the All Souls’ list in church, to be remembered at Mass on Saturday, 2 November (9.30am and 2pm).
And a reminder that Peter Crawford (petercrawford01[at]aol.com) would be pleased to hear from anyone who would like to receive rehearsal texts, music and videos for each Sunday’s hymns, in advance, by e-mail.
The Met Police’s Kenton West Safer Neighbourhoods Team are hosting a drop-in community contact surgery at Kenton Library on Tuesday, 22 October 12-12.30pm; in addition, all are welcome to join them for “Walk, Talk and Do” sessions on Friday, 11 October (Kenton Recreation Ground, 11.30am-12pm); Monday, 21 October (Kenton Recreation Ground, 1-1.45pm), and Monday, 28 October (Priestmead Park, 11-11.30am). Finally, “coffee with a copper” will take place on Thursday, 17 October at Belmont Costa Coffee, 11.30am-12pm.
This Sunday’s incense will be scented with damar: register your favourite scent here, between now and 4 November!
‘Let the favour of the Lord be upon us : give success to the work of our hands‘,
Fr Richard