Rector's letters

‘Then they went out and ran from the tomb, for terror and bewilderment had seized them. And they said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.’ Mark 16.1-8. So ends the Gospel of Mark, to many a short and unsatisfying end to the Gospel – the Greek even ends on a preposition (very bad Greek!). Several other later endings were added by other hands but Mark’s true account ends here with the women too afraid to speak of what they saw.

We are a good way into Lent by now, our 40 days of fasting, or what passes for fasting these days, usually the giving up of some self-destructive habit, like sugar in your tea or chocolate biscuits. All very useful but hardly a wilderness experience! I suppose we’ve lost our sense of urgency in the conduct of our spiritual lives, we don’t generally tend to think in terms of ‘doing battle with our lower natures.’ Such language belongs to an age of hand to hand combat.

In our increasingly secular world any kind of ‘organised religion’ is regarded as something strange and peculiar. People instead claim to be ‘spiritual’. Which rather sounds to me like claiming to be able to swim without getting wet! Religion is the embodiment of spirituality, it is what gives it shape and purpose, and allows the experience of generations to be shared and learned from.

This poem by Al Zolynas seems appropriate when there is so much to cause us concern this new year, from the ever present threat of global warming to the dreadful wars in both Israel and Ukraine, not to mention the endless conflict in Iraq and Yemen.

December 3rd is Advent Sunday. The season of Advent is all about waiting. But there is more than one sort of waiting – there is the kind of waiting when you know something’s going to happen and you know when it’s going to happen. Like Christmas, we all know when it is so we know how long we have to wait; and there are things that you wait for that you don’t know quite when they going to happen just that they will. Like catching the ball, you know that someone’s going to throw it to you, but you don’t know quite when so you have to stay ready, just in case – fielding in cricket is exactly like that. And we all know that life is like a game of cricket.

I write this on 19th October, given the need for submission deadlines it has to be rather ahead of publication date. Usually such a lead time would be no difficulty, none of our three parish magazines is designed to convey national, let alone international news – and certainly not the Rector’s letter. Yet as the world stands at the moment I can’t help thinking that the context of all our thoughts is desperately subject to change in disturbing ways.