Rector's letters

There is a parable that could have been written specially for a post-Covid church. It goes…
‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, “Grant me justice against my opponent.” For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.”‘

There are many opinions on prayer, but long gone is the idea that it matters what the proper physical attitude is. In fact, it is probably true that prayer is little thought of at all, even by those who do it! We who do pray tend not to think too much about the why or the how, we pray because we pray, for us to stop praying would be like removing a leg from a three-legged stool. Do we get answers to our prayers? It would be impossible to say empirically, but then it is not at all about getting answers.

This is the month of the great British get-a-way. The children have broken up and the family holidays begin. Whether it is to accompany a long flight, or for something to do by the poolside – many of us will take a novel to accompany our travels. I love stories, I can’t get enough of them – short stories, long stories, stories with a moral, stories without a moral, stories on the radio, stories on television, stories in a book. I don’t think I’m alone, human beings just respond to stories, made-up sequences of events, made-up characters, pure invention or supposed reality, it doesn’t really much matter, we just like stories.

Despite being in midsummer there are many reasons to be feeling low. You only have to listen to the news to become depressed about the state of the world and the nature of mankind. Psalm 77, for example, makes that very clear, but also suggests a remedy. Read it for yourself, it’s not long – just type Psalm 77 into Google if you haven’t a Bible to hand.

As I write, parts of northern Italy have been struggling under almost unprecedented levels of floodwater. We can recall the appalling floods in Pakistan last year, and in other places across the world in recent years.

Easter has long passed by the time you read this, but the church has not done with it so quickly. The chocolate eggs may be just a sweet memory, but there is an endless amount of thinking that will happen before we stop calling the Sundays after Easter ‘Sundays after Easter’. Death and resurrection are all around us, we so often see the former, but we sometimes need to be reminded of the latter.