MASS of Healing for the Elderly

End of Harvest.

It is the first day of Autumn. The 23rd of September is Equinox - equal hours of day and night. Now the days get shorter until the Winter Solstice.
The barley harvest is in.
Br. Aidan is happy that the calving is almost over. This year just a few sets of twin calves.
Autumn skies can be astonishing. In the dusk, during Compline, as I look through the windows there appear fast flitting streaks against the sky. I am assured they are bats on the evening flights.

Saint Gregory the Great (1972)
Walter Scott Avenue, Edinburgh
MASS of Healing for the Elderly.
St. Gregory’s – Group of the elderly and house bound. Three times a year the SVDP organise an event for the Seniors of the Parish. On 23^rd September they came to Nunraw. They asked to
Sacrament of Anointing. “They must anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord and pray for him” (James 4.14. In the Catholic Church we recognise this anointing in the name of the Lord as “the sacrament of the sick”. It is not always clear what is meant by a Mass of Healing. Someone who focuses very clearly on the perception and purpose of Mass with the Anointing of the Sick is Fr. Jim McManus. He refers to one person's testimony to healing through the Sacrament. “All I remember clearly is Jim saying he would use the prayers of the anointing of the Sick and anoint me and that is simply what he did”. She makes it very clear that the healing came through the sacrament of anointing. (Healing in the Spirit, DLT 1994, p. 133). The folk from St. Gregory’s had come for a Mass of Healing in this sense, to have a Mass of Healing, i.e. a Mass with the Anointing of the Sick. The other outward sign of their determination was their expert use of the aids and supports they had for the journey.

Even keeping on the one level at the Abbey Church, and the Guesthouse, Tea Room and Shop it was quite an obstacle exercise with the number of the wheel-chair and Zimmer equipped persons. There was no hurry. They took their stride, so to speak, the for the Mass and anointing, the time for negotiating steps and doors, and the enjoying of tea and shopping at leisure. You could not ask for a more cheerful people making little of their various kinds of disability and age.

St. Gregory's is now part of a Cluster of Churches.
The structure and a brief history of the Cluster of the four churches in the south of Edinburgh. Cluster History The Inch was originally part of St John Vianney's and St Columba's Parishes and after years of celebrating Sunday Mass in the Liberton annexe school in Walter Scott Avenue we purchased the former Scout Hall and became our own parish in 1972. In September 2003 the Parish entered into a clustering arrangement with St John Vianney's Gilmerton and St Catherine's Gracemount. Follwed by the addition of St Ninian’s to form the cluster as it is today