I entered our abbey church for Compline, a little early, and found several sisters already sitting in the dimly-lit space. It was the evening before the Solemnity of the Dedication of the Church. As part of the celebrations a candle is lit at each of the twelve dedication crosses on the wall, giving a unique and prayerful atmosphere to the church. The crosses are also decorated with a sprig of purple heather.

There is so much to love about this feast. Not only is it the anniversary of the dedication of this church in Yorkshire in 2015, it is also the date on which the abbey church at our former home in Worcester was dedicated in 1871. My first visit ever to the community, which was then at Worcester, coincided with this celebration. There were two dedication crosses in the extern chapel, with their attendant candles, but I couldn’t see anything else of the church beyond the sanctuary. I listened to the nuns singing the gloria at Mass and it was so beautiful I could imagine the whole community from across the centuries processing into heaven, and I longed to join them. The whole of the Divine Office for the Dedication of a church is an invitation to enter into God’s house, to the place where he dwells. We hear in psalm 83, the very first psalm at Vigils and also the Responsorial Psalm at Mass, ‘One day within your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere’ and ‘the threshold of the house of God I prefer to all Jacob’s dwellings’.

For we are celebrating not only, or even not so much, the building of the church, the bricks and mortar, the stone and the wood, but the fact of God dwelling with us and within us. In the first letter to the Corinthians St Paul writes, ‘Didn’t you realise that you were God’s temple and that the Spirit of God was living among you?… The temple of God is sacred; and you are that temple.’ So on this feast day we have high aspirations – to be temples of the Holy Spirit – but also an awareness of the closeness and immanence of God, dwelling within us as a community, and within each of us as individuals.

Sr Therese OSB