For
over six months now, I have been actively looking for a new posting. My current
post, in Liverpool Diocese, comes to an end (at least on paper) next month.
Today I received the latest in a growing pile of correspondence informing me
that I had not been offered a post I had applied for. This in itself is alright
– my prayer is not, ‘Let me get this job’ but, ‘Your will be done’ – but there
is only so many times you can stomach being told that you will be
outstanding...somewhere else.
We
had hoped that we would know by now. Indeed, originally we had hoped that we
would have been able to move next week. For several good reasons, that was our
preferred timing. We’re not living in a war zone, or with cancer, but we have
been living – and continue to live – with a protracted season of uncertainty:
and while we can’t put life on hold, neither are we able to make firm plans.
This takes its toll, in many ways, some bigger than others.
The
situation we find ourselves in is further complicated by the various
expectations of others, most of which, however well-meant, are fairly
unhelpful.
Where
is God in all this? And how might Trinity Sunday resource our continued
watching and waiting?
God
is where God has always been: seated on the throne in heaven. As Christians
have needed to be reminded ever since the letters that form the New Testament
were written, things look very different from a heavenly perspective. Our
circumstances are precarious, even when they look secure; but God is at work to
bring about his good will, not by coercion or inevitability but by the
world-overthrowing power of love.
Christians
believe that there is one God, and that this one God exists in the form of a
community. As we also believe that we are made in the likeness of this God,
that invites us to understand ourselves as persons – existing in indivisible
relationship to others – and not, as is prevalent in western culture, as
individuals – a sub-human form of life. But the Trinity is a mystery: that is
to say, though it can be known, through revelation, it cannot be exhausted by
our understanding. Unlike every good gift in creation, it is an infinite
resource given us. And at present, I am reflecting on Rublev’s icon as a window
into that greater reality.
According
to Rublev’s symbolism, the Spirit reaches out to us, drawing us deeper into a life
of prayer; from which vantage-point we see a greater revelation of the Son as
our peace and as our pilgrim’s shelter on the way to the Father; who, in turn,
we experience as the one in whom we find our permanent home. We meet the Spirit
in the wilderness at the very edge of the Promised Land; the Son beneath the
tree where Abraham camped as one who held the Promise in potential, or the tree
where Deborah sat to exercise God’s wise judgements within the Land, or the
tree in Micah’s great vision (Micah 4:1-8, which combines mountain and tree and
house with watchtower); and the Father as fulfilment of his Promise.
When
we are reminded that our home is the Father’s house – that we are a child of
God – and that Christ is our peace and that the Spirit draws us into this
deeper reality through the unpromising foothills of circumstance [the children
enter Narnia because of the Blitz] those circumstances are restored to their
rightful perspective: not as trivial (to be dismissed), but as boastful (and
passing); not as an illusion (to be denied), but as a place of grace (where
death fails to keep its grasp on life).
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