MYDDELTON GRANGE

 

     

The Youth Retreat House for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Leeds

 

 

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Text Box: The first Annual May Devotion Retreat took place on the weekend 5th- 6th May

 

 

 

 

 

                                                        Text Box: Hail! Queen of the May   I grew up in a parish that was dedicated to Mary, Queen of Angels.  I remember praying before her altar in the church from a very early age and having a real and immediate sense of being close to someone very special.  It has to be said that at certain points in my life I have drifted away from those childhood moments and even laughed at the sentimentality of my devotion to Mary.  But as I get older, and as I try to understand the person of Jesus more and more, I am finding that he doesn’t make much sense when he is divorced from his humanity, when he is taken out of the context of his family on earth.   Over the first weekend in May, we held a retreat at Myddelton Grange which hinged on the simplicity of Mary’s life as epitomised in those hidden years in Nazareth.  We know very little about most of Jesus’ life and I wonder if the Gospel writers chose not to write about it because it was so ordinary, because it was so much like our own lives.  Perhaps they thought that we would take 30 years of Our Lord’s life ‘as read’.  It strikes me then that the starting point of understanding Our Lord is to understand the nuts and bolts of our own lives, the boring bits where nothing dramatic happens, but which at the same time are still home to the Divine.   Maybe we think God only reveals himself in great and dramatic moments; we think wrong then!  Mary learnt about her God – to whom she had said, “Yes!” – in her very ordinary attempts to be a Mother. What could be more ordinary than motherhood? And who, at the same time, is more united to a Creator God than one who nurtures, sustains and trains another human?  And so it follows that my devotion to Mary must be very earthy, very simple, because it is in this fashion that she brought up her Son and it is in this fashion that Jesus reveals himself to us.   Our retreat ended with a procession in honour of Mary and the crowning of her statue.  This is a very ancient practice and one which reflects the pilgrimage that all of us undertake in this world.  It is a pilgrimage at the end of which we hope to see the face of God. However, while we are on that journey, God grants us glimpses of his face as he reveals Himself in the Church, in the world and in each of our brothers and sisters.  I, and countless millions of other people – and not just Catholics – have found that image of God in the Blessed Virgin Mary.  In the month of May, the Church invites us all to take a close look at this woman who is given to us as a great gift of heaven.  Move closer and take a look.   Our Lady of Walsingham, pray for us.   Fr. Simon                                                                                                                         9v07

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                          

                                                     

                                      

                                             

                                                                

 

The retreat ended with the procession of the Virgin Mary from Calvary to the Chapel

 

All pictures kindly taken by Matthew Lloyd

 

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Last modified: 12/05/07                                                                                                                                                                            
Diocese of Leeds Charity No. 249404                                                                      Title picture by kind permission of  Matthew Lloyd