Living in hope
Grant us the faith to know and love you, that we may be found beside you on the way of the cross, which is the path of life (from the Palm Sunday Collects).
Sometimes, we might look at our Easter celebration as an event, an act of worship, or a special day in the year. Another way of looking, is to see how we are invited into a new season of life this April, called to share God’s work of creating and sustaining new life – in all that we are, and all that we do. For, like every Sunday, the real work of faith begins with how we live life on the following Monday, and the weekdays that follow. It seems to me a good place to start our life as the Easter People, especially when it begins this year on Monday 1st April, traditionally All Fools Day!
For instance, we may feel that suffering and death (the Way of the Cross) is left behind us, or “overcome”, in the glory of the resurrection. “Fill your Church with faith and hope for a new day has dawned” we pray in the Easter Collect. Yet real life, when we get back to it, is still full of difficulty and pain. Our life of faith needs to equip us for this.
When I ask people how they see the world today, I am finding deeper and deeper pessimism. There’s no confidence in global leaders or a shared world order. There’s despair around how we are treating God’s creation and the impact this has on the most vulnerable people. “Give us light in our darkness, and bring us out of despair”, we might pray, in the words of the Easter Vigil Collect. I am drawing on the words of our shared prayers because these can give us words to express our feelings to, with, or alongside God. We see this in many ancient faith traditions, such as the Psalms. The actions of Jesus and the first disciples build on this. In our communion services, the opening prayers are called “collects” because they invite us to bring together, before God, all that is going on in our lives and the life of the world. They can help us.
Living daily life in the light of Easter requires resilience and hope, every hour of every day. We need our prayer life to support us in this as we live the way of the cross again and again each day. This is not like the film Groundhog Day, where we do the same things again and again, and nothing changes. We don’t find that thinking if we study the bible or the Christian faith tradition either. Instead, faith requires learning, as well as hope and love. Then, each time we can try new ways of doing things, relying on that unquenchable well of imagination with which God has blessed human life. New life springs from drawing on God’s goodness like this.
Indeed the poet TS Elliot wrote that “in our journeying we come back again to the place of our beginning and know it for the first time”. When we share God’s work of creating and sustaining new life, we can have faith that repetition will eventually bring us into a new reality, perhaps in surprising ways. Indeed we ourselves are changed by this work of creative living, as is the whole of Creation around us. This is a form of new life. I see this as like the extraordinary eco-systems, which I believe God has built into the design of Creation. It’s not for nothing that David Attenborough’s TV documentaries come up first in many google searches abut the environment. Ecosystems in nature remind us of this essential truth, that new life is not something that happens once, at birth, but something that is constantly happening. Life is constantly being renewed. This is why, in nature, suffering and death are both essential parts of the ecosystem that sustains life in this world. So it is with God’s work of creating and sustaining new life, and we are called to be part of this. In further words adapted from the Palm Sunday collects, let us pray that we may follow the example of Jesus’ humility and also partake in the new life and hope, found in the resurrection.
With best wishes
Paul
Now find out what Grey is doing to raise awareness of the needs of the Palestinisans in Gaza here
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