A Message from Fr Peter

As you make your own visit to the cemetery this year these are little prayers you may use at your family grave. Copies of these prayers are available in our local businesses and the church porch and can be used in the home as you remember your loved ones.

A video of my own visit and blessings of graves in all our cemeteries will be on Facebook next weekend.God Bless.(See above)

Visiting a Graveyard

May perpetual light shine upon the faces of all who rest here. May the lives they lived unfold further in spirit. May all their past travail find ease in the kindness of clay. May the remembering earth mind every memory they brought. May the rains from the heavens fall gently upon them. May the wildflowers and grasses whisper their wishes into light. May we always reverence the village of presence in the stillness of this silent field.

John O’Donoghue’s untimely death at the age of fifty-two meant that he never reached his own harvest time. He was still very much in the flowering of his summer. He will be missed. His blessing for death takes on an added poignancy now. May there indeed be ‘a beautiful welcome home’ for John and all our loved ones. To quote his own words from ‘For the dying’-

May your spirit feel
The surge of true delight
When the veil of the visible
Is raised, and you glimpse again
The living faces
Of departed family and friends.

May there be some beautiful surprise
Waiting for you inside death,
Something you never knew or felt,
Which with one simple touch
Absolves you of all loneliness and loss,
As you quicken within the embrace
For which your soul was eternally made.

May your heart be speechless
At the sight of the truth
Of all your belief had hoped,
Your heart breathless
In the light and lightness
Where each and every thing
Is at last its true self
Within that serene belonging
That dwells beside usOn the other side
Of what we see. 

From Benedictus: A Book of Blessings