A weird Sunday

I’ve just finished my penultimate Sunday before my sabbatical begins. I’m looking forward to a change of focus and pace, but this wretched pandemic has again intervened in my life. Being away from my people at this point feels like in many ways an unwelcome interruption as things are only just beginning to get going in the eight churches I serve, little sparks of hope and possibility. I’ve been here a year and five months but it hasn’t been the usual start to an appointment! Normally I’d have met everyone by now, been seen at events inside and outside the church, and been in and out of people’s homes to visit them over a cuppa. Someone said to me this morning, “we don’t really know you.” She was right. 

It is fascinating to note people’s reactions to a sabbatical. Some people have asked what I am doing on my holiday! I can’t explain why I felt sad after leaving my folk at Dallowgill this afternoon after their service and a 15 minute Church Council (my world record!!!) I am not worried about letting things go. I guess it’s because it’s only now I am feeling my encouragement of these churches I was sent to at the height of pandemic

is bearing fruit and so it’s hard to think of three months away. My pictures in this blog post are all from the journey back across the moor towards home. Lots of sheep!

I’ve a busy week with more funerals, Church Councils, other meetings, worship next Sunday  and pastoral stuff but I’m also using this week to begin to focus on what the next three months might bring us. I’m looking forward to focussing on encountering sacred space in historic Christian  sites and receiving worship in other than Methodist churches on Sundays, using our cathedral and Fountains Abbey a lot, enjoying doing Holy Week and Easter liturgy on Holy Island, and getting my book on honest journeying with God finally finished. I only started it in 2016!! 

I am trying to be open to where God leads, and having time to do stuff at home I have neglected and spending quality time with Lis without rushing out the door all the time. 

When I had my first sabbatical from March to May 2009, I stayed on Holy Island for the first time. In the lounge of the retreat house was a poem which included the words “you did not come here to get away, you came here in order to go back.” What will I come back to? I wonder! I wished my congregation at Bishop Monkton this morning a happy Easter! I’ll return in the Easter season. Let’s hope I am refreshed and in the meantime all our communities keep looking and enjoying the stirrings of the divine which are quietly happening all about us. Perhaps we’ve spent too long just not looking…

So sadness today, yes, but a confidence that maybe if Covid starts to go away from the summer we might really begin to flourish here. The light of hope is there. And over these next three months I just pray I might see what might be possible as we’ve time to stand and stare a bit…

And I pray there might be surprises! I returned to Holy Island as part of sabbatical in 2016. On a Monday afternoon the retreat house door swung open. Um! Look what happened seven months later!