A room full of silence. Each one of us lost in some way, with our own thoughts and emotions. Fifty days may seem a long time to some but actually 49 of them had passed very quickly and most of us were still raw. There was denial, shock and anger still gangling about inside and between us and no one really knew what to say.
I sat down on the floor, my back against the wall looking toward the small window. Outside the sunset had just got to that point when it seems the sky is on fire. I watched the fire rage and then burn down low as the sun finally sank below the horizon.
What next? He had said we should wait and wait we had. We were still waiting, not all of us graciously. Arguments flared up, things were said or not said: it was a mess. Only Mary his mother looked at all calm. She was waiting as he said and we did our best to wait like her.
There was plenty of time, plenty of time for thoughts to weave back and forth. It was impossible not to relive the past. There was the trauma of his death of course, but I could slip back beyond that sometimes to the green hills and valleys, the blue lake, even the dusty road. There had been good times as we’d listened and learnt and travelled together. He had shown us a way. It had been extraordinary. Not religious in the confined sense of obligations but in a joyous sense of freedom and new discoveries. Each view of the landscape linked to a thought or action, each meeting together a crucible of anticipation. Change had travelled with us, welcomed and exciting. The call to justice was strong; to live in peace, to be merciful. We all wanted those things and he had awakened that longing in us, with his stories, the prayers and most of all the silence.
‘Wait’ he had said and in a few hours the sun would come up on the fiftieth day. Would it be different to the previous 49? Would we, feeling that we had been loosing it all this time, finally rediscover The Way?

In our life and our believing
The Love of God

For churches in Yorkshire and beyond, who are struggling to find The Way again: Pentecost 2017