It's been an unusual few days.
I haven't yet packed up my house... it's a strange thing - this resignation of control...
Faith!
They'll move the contents of my old life to the new one.
Some of it I will leave behind, metaphorically speaking.
The days have been punctuated with goodbyes, promising myself I would visit everyone who wanted to exchange final hugs and prayers. It's been tiring but lovely - all these unique people. Praying slightly differently, dependent on the person for whom the prayers have been said. Receiving prayers in return for a fruitful future, for my husband and the girls, for discernment and wisdom and more of God's Spirit.
I have half-finished meditations and sermons as Holy Week progresses and as my writing is interrupted by visits and visiting, time spent at home has involved too much pacing, as I go from room to room wondering really if I can leave that corner of confusion without boxing it up into something more orderly.
And then just when you begin to find pace with the week, even though its one of such weight, both for its story and our leaving, a new experience comes... and with it ... more thinking.
I find myself writing an article for The Sun Newspaper.
For Easter.
Its relevance to the twenty-first century generation: the smart-phone, pop idol, social media savvy generation and apart from the pop idols I have such things in my life.
So for a moment, faith becomes strange again, or at least objectified, as a reporter from the paper asks me about clothes. Zara is mentioned as a place to buy skirts and I think 'But where are we expected to shop - the moon?'
And I write something about the atonement in the only way I can think how.
Where else do we see such courage played out?
The courage of the cross?
So vast.
So huge.
So I put pen to paper, or rather fingers to keyboard and say something about whistle-blowing and even day time TV, our obsessions with story, modern day betrayal, last meals with colleagues before huge actions are taken that will change friendships forever.
Is there something in this that's a little like Easter?
The Last Supper.
Remembrance.
Blood out-poured.
Wine.
And in a telephone interview I am asked about the alcohol and I share just one scripture amongst other things that come to mind - the one about not being drunk on wine but being filled with the Spirit and there is a smile I can hear from the other end as I mention the pun that is there on the Spirit. I then talk about how no amount of anything that the world can give, can compare to relationship in God through his Spirit.
...How if only there had been Street Angels around back then, outside the clubs that I had danced in, when younger.
...How in raising two girls, as I do, I see vulnerability... and the Easter story's there again, is it not, in water and flip-flops?
...And perhaps I say too much and I wonder what will come of it but a friend says take these opportunities to speak of the gospel. Well, perhaps they won't publish it after all, I tell myself.
I then spend an hour being photographed (for the Sun Newspaper) in the church that I am leaving and as I check my hair in the reflection of the huge golden cross on the Communion table I wonder quite what I am doing. The cross becomes my mirror - the cross of Jesus! For a while I have made it reflect me back to me.
And I hope for a moment that this will all be okay, that my motives are the right ones and my words will not be twisted.
Faith.
...it's a strange thing - this resignation of control...
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