During the break between the two halves of the End to End in 2019 I was contributing some sessions on Remembering the Bible (RB) to the East Midlands Ministers Summer School. It was a risk. It was 19 years since I first visited and began the series of interactions with ministers that were part of Word of Mouth (www.ionabooks.com) and East Midlands were the first Synod to invite me back.
During the week I took some risks. One was climbing a slippery wobbly stile on an afternoon walk. I fell. I got a bruised arm in the process but I would still be able to go back to LEJOG at the end of the week.
In fact, we take risks every day. Some are everyday risks which we know, due to our social conditioning, are OK in our context: we can drink the water from the tap for example. In 2020 we have to re-evaluate what we understand about taking risks. Perhaps we always did, but then again maybe we didn’t say so much about the subject except in some specific contexts, like rape for example.
I took a risk when I stepped on the slippery wobbly stile which I should have known about having fallen off a slippery wobbly one a few years earlier. But none of us has ever lived in a post-COVID19 world before. The risks we decide to take will affect other people and the risks they take. That’s how society works.
I read a blog about one persons’ view of what the church should have been doing during the lock down other than arguing about access to shut churches and if what a few people did with bread and wine was in some way ‘valid’ or not. It suggested we should have been doing other things, one of which was ‘giving an account of the hope that is in us’. This LEJOG reblog is an attempt at that. It is a reflection on a set of reflections: 117 days of them. A sea-saw of emotions that took me up the country, past fish and chip shops and ice cream stalls, counting butterflies and remembering psalms: there was a hope in me. It was often very, very, very small. Sometimes it got bigger.
A year ago, the second half of the walk still lay before me. It was a risk: there was hope, but the relationship between them was very complicated.
From the remembered bible: Be still and know that I am God.
Still one, with me still,
hopeful one, in my hope,
risk-living one, in my risk:
be in the slipping and the falling,
the tripping and the gripping:
May we rise with you.
JAL: 13.06.2020 in Longdendale.