‘GOD IS THE BEYOND IN OUR MIDST’
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
Welcome to Mayfield Salisbury Parish Church
In a world of religious and atheistic fundamentalists and in a society paradoxically multi-faith and secular, Mayfield Salisbury is a Christian community which celebrates what it means to be human and explores the depth of meaning of the Christian faith as it interacts with everyday life. We seek to be open, inclusive and affirming of all people in our life together and our understanding of God, recognising that all humans are formed in God’s image regardless of their age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or religion. Our exploration of Christian faith reflects the reality that to be human means that we are each formed by a rich blend of intuition and reason, knowledge and emotion, faith and doubt, affirming and seeking, succeeding and failing, joy and sorrow, brokenness and wholeness.
In our services of public worship we seek to wrestle in thought, prayer, music and creativity with the basic questions of life- Why are we here? Who and what are we? Where do we find meaning and purpose in life? Where is God present in our lives and in our communities? How are we being challenged to respond? Beyond our church services, we seek to grow spiritually and to live out a faith which expresses in action Jesus’ command to love our neighbour as ourselves in caring for others, by making a stand against injustice, and in embracing creation care for the Earth in the face of the climate crisis.
We believe that faith in Jesus Christ can lead to uplifting and transformation for all people, in the neighbourhood and in the nation. As a congregation together, a community of pilgrims, we support and encourage one another to that end in faith, hope and love. In the words of the hymn ‘Let us Build a House where Love can Dwell’, ‘all are welcome in this place’. You are most welcome to join us on the pilgrim journey!
Hope Glimmers
More Information: HERE
We are delighted that the visual artists Peter Gardner and Heidi Gardner, working as Gardner & Gardner, are creating the installation ‘Hope Glimmers’ at the Mayfield Salisbury church building, to be in place for three weeks from 7th to 28th June 2021. Please register to join Peter and Heidi on Sunday 20th June at 7pm at a ‘Meet the Artists’ Zoom event online... More information
Mayfield Salisbury Parish Church,
18 West Mayfield,
Edinburgh,
EH9 1TQ
0131 667 1522 / 0780 801 1234
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Scottish Charity Number: SC000785
Because God is both knowable and unknowable the tension of the symbol, the multilayers of the myth and the openness of the poetic are all vital to our desire to celebrate the Mystery to whom we relate and in whom we have our being.
Mark Oakley
You must love him as he is: neither God, nor spirit, nor image; even more, the One without commingling, pure, luminous ...
Meister Eckhart
The purpose of our life is God's glory. However lowly a life is, that is what makes it great.
Oscar Romero
Faith may justify bigotry or fanaticism, as Church history tragically witnesses. It needs a safeguard. If it is not animated as it were by the greatest of the theological virtues (love), faith can become defective.
Thomas Norris
Dry not, dry not, your tears of love eternal! Only to eyes that fail to weep does this world seem so dull and dead. Dry not, dry not, those long, sad tears of love.
Johann von Goette
The post modern paradigm manifests itself as a unity which preserves diversity and diversity which strives after unity.
David Bosch
There is only one assertion that requires no evidence. Children are a sacred trust...Unless we care properly for our children, we shall never build a better world.
'A Good Childhood’ The Children’s Society
These are only hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses; and the rest is prayer.
'The Dry Salvages' T.S.Eliot
According to strict truth, God is incomprehensible, and incapable of being measured.
Origen
Myth is a story about the way things never were, but always are.
Thomas Mann
In the darkness ...The child of your love - and now become as the most hated one - the one You have thrown away as unwanted - unloved ..... The darkness is so dark .... I have no faith.
Mother Teresa
I love the Bible. I owe my faith and my life to the Bible and its liberating message. It is in the Bible that I first met Jesus ... I too am included in God's embrace.
Gene Robinson
It is this great absence that is like a presence, that compels me to address it without hope of a reply ....
R.S. Thomas
Faith is not a proud self-consistent philosophy. It involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis. It is therefore a living response to the grace of God as revealed in fragile lives.
Mark Oakley
Any religion which does not say that God is hidden is not true.
Blaise Pascal
The contemporary Church is losing aspects of its wide and generous memory and therefore condemning itself to become a 'swimming pool Church' - one that has all the noise coming from the shallow end.
Mark Oakley
For all your doctrinal headaches take Paradox.
Mark Oakley
The true vision and the true knowledge of what we seek consists precisely in not seeing, in an awareness that our goal transcends all knowledge and is everywhere cut off from us by the darkness of incomprehensibility.
St Gregory of Nyssa
Death, death be hanged, the Lord has promised me that I shall live. This I believe!
Martin Luther
We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life have not been put to rest.
Wittgenstein
Religion is the flight of the alone to the Alone.
Plotinus
Stupid clergymen appeal quite directly to a Bible passage directly understood ....
Soren Kirkegaard
What is the point of the arts of reading and criticism as long as the ecclesiastical interpretation of the Bible, Protestant as well as Catholic, is cultivated as ever?
Friedrich Nietzsche
A figure like Ecclesiast, rugged and luminous, chants in the dark a text that is the answer, although obscure.
Wallace Stevens
Myth is the poetry of the soul.
Sara Maitland
Our loss of the ability to think mythically, poetically, allegorically, creatively, theologically, and artfully is a greater threat to our religious experience than anything good scientists have to report ...
Sara Maitland
In general, Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.
Douglas Hofstadter
'God' is a one word poem
Rowan Williams
What is today? Today is eternity.
Meister Eckhart
Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things.
Meister Eckhart
The most powerful hunger we have, mostly suppressed and misdirected, is the hunger for God.
Miroslav Volf
We frequently judge that things are as we wish them to be, for through personal feeling true perspective is easily lost.
Thomas a Kempis
Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.
Rabindranath Tagore
God is the beyond in our midst.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
'God is not the answer, God is the question.'
Herbert McCabe
