Pastoral Letter (July/August 2010)

from The Revd Nick Thompson

Dear Friends

At Half Term recently it was so good to get away to the beautiful and remote island of Iona in Scotland.  The weather was largely stunning and the light at this time of year is remarkable.  In fact it was barely dark at all!  The quality of the light is unusual too.  It has been described as a ‘thin’ place – as though the gap between Heaven and Earth here is tiny.  Some believe that that is to do with the prayers said on the island for 1500 years now since St. Columba travelled there from Ireland and founded a Christian Community – a place of Mission and Prayer.

It is certainly a place that feels different.

The title of our week in the Abbey there was ‘The Art of Looking Sideways’.  In talks and worship we looked at the place of Imagination and Art in church life.  There were opportunities to be creative and to think outside the box as we reflected on a God who is always bigger that our words and pictures can make him.  I was reminded of 2 of our more profound hymns “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea” and number 8 in Hymns and Psalms, which ends:

  “Thou art a sea without a shore
    A sun without a sphere
    Thy time is now and evermore
    Thy place is everywhere”

Two simple things brought this home to me.  From the tiny hill on Iona you can see dozens of islands as far away as Skye.  One evening on the clearest day of all you could even see ‘Barra’ 60 miles away to the North West.  It was a distant speck on the horizon but only visible by looking slightly to the side of it.  Looking too hard or directly at it, it was quite invisible!

Every night at 9pm there is a short act of Worship in the Abbey.  At the end one night I came out alone into a sunny and still evening and heard a ‘corncrake’ in the neighbouring field.  They are very rare and elusive birds now in the UK.  They live in long grass and have a distinctive rasping call and are very secretive.  You can listen to them for hours but fail to see them.  Somehow that evening for the first time I saw one.  I stood still entranced by the corncrake’s call and looked slightly to the side of the source of its call.  Quietly and momentarily I saw this amazing bird and then it was gone.

In church we are here to witness to the endless and mysterious goodness of God. So after he seems to be absent from our experience we look for him sometimes too anxiously in the wrong way.  But when we are still and focussed and open to his possibilities, then, for a moment, we glimpse something of the holiness of his truth and beauty.

I hope that summer is a good time for you – a time to stop and relax a little – a time to look sideways and see life in a new way.

God Bless

Nick