WORD OF LIFE: BREAD OF LIFE (not just in Bristol!)

E SHALL CELEBRATE Easter in a special way this year. Instead of the round of Paschal Stational Masses, we shall have 'one big do'. The Paschal Stational Mass, the Ebbsfleet Festival of Faith, is on Saturday 12th May at 12 noon in Bristol Cathedral. I have asked Bishop John Ford to bring the Exeter folk along and Bishop David Thomas will be crossing Offa's Dyke with a party of Welshmen. How we shall all fit into the Cathedral remains to be seen! It was a full nave last time and we have grown since 2003. Meanwhile coaches are being booked and train seats reserved.

The theme of the celebration is 'Word of Life: Bread of Life'. We encounter the Risen Lord both in his Holy Word and in the Blessed Sacrament. We also encounter him in each other, especially in the poor and needy, and it is for this reason, particularly, that we can't be private Christians. We need the community, we need each other. We are a pilgrim people, marching together on holy rations.

I hope 'Word of Life: Bread of Life' will continue to be our theme throughout the coming year. The new Ebbsfleet Formation Council met recently and looked at some of the rich resources for evangelism and catechesis - preaching the Good News and teaching people the Faith. Some of these resources were used too for planning the recent Parish Evangelism Weekend in Oxford.

I arranged in Lent for 'Bible Alive', a daily bible reading aid, to be sampled in every parish. Few people can be at Mass each day. Most people can keep up with the Gospel of the Day. We need to be Christians who take the Word seriously. The promise of the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth is not the promise of private tuition for every Christian but a promise to the whole Church: when the Church is obedient to the Word of God, the Spirit continues to lead us forward. The alternative is a do-it-yourself Christianity which re-invents itself as it struggles to keep up to date with whatever is going on in the world, and there is plenty of that around.

As Catholic Christians we value not just the Word of Life but the Bread of Life. We have been trying out some 'Fresh Expressions of Church' by trying to present the Eucharist in fresh ways. The 'Vigil-X' Mass, the 'Generation Y?' Mass and the 'M:18-30' (Mass for Young People) have been bold experiments and, in their different ways, they continue. 'Vigil-X', when the current episcopally-led series in the West Midlands finishes in June, will be packaged as a set of resources for parishes to use. Some parishes are experimenting successfully with low-threshold non-eucharistic services, to make it easier for people to join what seems like from the outside like a club or game with very strange rules. Yet our primary task remains to present the newly-evangelised with the glory of the sacramental life of the Church. New life through Baptism: Holy Communion as 'the medicine of immortality' Ignatius of Antioch).

The Risen Lord is always there ahead of us. That is why - once the Easter Candle is lit at the Vigil - every time we see it thereafter - throughout Eastertide and at Baptisms and Confirmations - it is already burning. May Christ the Pillar of Fire lead us as we celebrate his glorious resurrection on the journey to the Promised Land.

+ Andrew Ebbsfleet



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