Damien Stayne
As part of our preparation for Holy Week we are having a Healing Service on Tuesday evening at 7.30pm to be led by Damian Stayne. If you would like to know more about his work go to the website www.coretlumenchristi.org – this tells you about the life of the Cor et Lumen Christi community. This is a lay Catholic community recognised by the diocese of Arundel and Brighton (it is based in Chertsey in Surrey) and is part of an international fraternity of such communities recognised by the Holy See.
This is the community’s Charism statement: ‘Divine Communion, which is an intimate union of love with God, is both the source and the fruit of the life and mission of Cor et Lumen Christi. At the Transfiguration, the Trinitarian communion of love, always present in the heart of Jesus, is revealed. We too have access to this communion of love, above all in the Holy Eucharist which is the tabernacle of the Trinity – divine love and light in our midst.
That is why the Eucharist is the heart of the community, just as it is the heart of the whole church. With the Eucharist as our heart, we are seeking to build a spiritual extended family in which all the vocational states of life are at home. A community which lives a radical Christian vocation as a living prophetic sign.
A place where Catholics can find harmony between: the charismatic life and social responsibility, community life and missionary outreach, joyful praise and worship and silent contemplation. We endeavour to respond to a call from God to live an heroic vulnerability to the loving presence of our holy and beautiful Lord, and to live out what is, essentially, a prophetic vocation. We seek to encourage God’s people in the glory of their vocation as “partakers in the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4) that they might embrace the fullness of their baptismal inheritance through life in the Spirit and to enter deeply into the Divine Communion of love and light which is our God.’
Of healing services like the one we are having Blessed Paul VI, wrote: ‘We cannot but desire that these gifts come and may God grant it – with abundance. Besides grace, let God’s church be able to obtain and possess the charisms……God grant that the Lord would still increase this rain of charisms to make the church fruitful, beautiful, marvellous and capable of inspiring respect, even the attention and amazement of the profane world, the secular world.’