St Mary’s Newchurch
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…
This evocative opening line from John Keats’ poem Ode to Autumn came to mind recently when I looked across the valley towards Pendle Hill from Spen Heights Farm. Could I see it? Not on your nelly! Shrouded in true Mist Over Pendle fashion, I couldn’t even see St Mary’s sitting in its shadow. But, of course, I knew the hill was there – solid, permanent, majestic, mysterious, inviting.
It occurs to me that that’s not such a bad way to think about God: at once unseen, like mist-muffled Pendle Hill but, in majestic and mysterious ways, ever-present.
In His soft-shoe-shuffle dance of absence & presence God often seems to invite us to encounter Him in and through beguiling glimpses and surreptitious snatches: in the tiniest seed and insect; the furthest pinprick of a star in the galaxy; the wrinkled face of a newborn baby; the Heron’s poise; a single paint-dot of colour on a white canvas ocean; the Curlew’s song; in tragedy and crisis; in smiles and tears; in anxiety and addiction; in birth and death; in dreaming and waking; in love, broken and mended; in earthquake, wind and fire; in the still, small voice of calm.
All these, and more, are open windows through which we are invited (if we have willing eyes to see, ears to hear, minds to wonder, and hearts to believe) to encounter Him, to know Him, to be present to, with and in Him. For it seems that above all else God wants to draw us into a relationship with Him and, knowing us as he does, He provides many and varied ways for that to happen. Take the God-man Jesus, for example. Why else would God, in-the-flesh, incarnate, choose to come among us, to encounter us, to be in relationship with us, unless he wanted us, in-the-flesh, to encounter and be in relationship with Him?
The reason I write all of this is because – approaching the end of my 12-month, Autumn to Autumn sojourn among you – I have been pondering on my own encounters with God as your Interim Vicar. What might I take with me as souvenirs to stick on my fridge, put on my mantelpiece, keep in my heart and mind? What blessings (often in disguise) have I been blessed with from you?
Well, there are definitely ‘magic moments’ of souvenir-filled, blessed encounter – special services, concerts and events, school visits, and, early on a Sunday morning, in my bruised and battered car, catching an occasional rain-and-mist-free-glimpse of a sun-soaked Heaven above Newchurch-in-Pendle before descending into Spen Brook and up the hill to The Cathedral in the Forest!
But chiefly I am aware that God has revealed Himself to me through the unique beauty of YOU, his children, in whose image you are made. It’s you, the souls I have been called to tend for a short season, that are the souvenirs I will most treasure.
Through your kindness and care, your deep sense of community, your solidarity in the face of tragedy, your commitment to creation, in all of these you have been a window ajar through which the mist has lifted, and I have glimpsed more clearly the sun-soaked, multifaceted face of God.
For the privilege of this blessing, I will forever bless you.
With grateful and grace-filled thanks.