Clarion Online
Message from the Vicar, Father Kevin Morris, March 2008
Recently I read Tom Wright’s book “The Cross and the Colliery.” They contain sermons he gave in Holy Week as Bishop of Durham, in a part of his diocese where the communities had been devastated by the closure of the mining industry. I had a personal interest, in that I was brought up in a similar situation in South Wales. He writes,
“The pit was razed to the ground and the entire area grassed over. Where once there was a busy and highly productive pit employing thousands, there is now an eerie sense of bereavement, of the heart having been ripped out of a community.”
I found that I could identify easily with his descriptions of a community bearing a sense of great loss, of “bereavement” as he puts it.
“This extraordinary and bewildering sense of loss is highlighted by the social effects of removing not only the main employer but also the main source of income for the whole community. The bustling, lively main street now has several shops boarded up. The old school, substantial and solidly built, is not a large, ugly shell, a target for vandals and a reminder to the whole town of what once was and is no more. The Council has done great things with a new school and other amenities, but the signs of a great disaster are all around. In the old streets, some of the houses are derelict; others are used as bases for drug dealers who do an all-too-brisk trade in the area, others still inhabited by long-time residents who don’t want to leave their homes of many decades but are in some cases afraid to walk down their own streets. In most of the calculations of social deprivation- drug and alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancies, obesity and sheer poverty itself – … it comes near the bottom of the pile.”
I too want to ask the questions with him,
• “What has the Easter story to say to these people?
• Can it offer any more than the comfort of a well-worn tale?”
In some ways I was disappointed with the book: I came away with the feeling that it had been written from the perspective of a well intention outsider (arrogantly?) trying to sort out someone else’s painful history with some well chosen words.
But I also found myself struggling to find ways of tackling the profound questions that Bishop Wright raises: What then would I say?
I think I heard a great deal of what makes sense to me, and which points me in the right direction as I seek too respond to those questions, in the sermon of one of our visiting preachers, the Archdeacon of Carmarthen. In his sermon on the theme of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, Fr Alun was dealing with the same theological focus as Bishop Wright and pointing us to the great truths we will celebrate during Holy Week and Easter. (We have included the sermon in this edition of the Clarion). Speaking about the Transfiguration, (in the words of an earlier Bishop of Durham, Ian Ramsey) as a “Moment of Disclosure”, he urged us to remember and to seek those
“times when, in, but through and beyond the events of our daily lives, we experience ‘moments of disclosure’ and have access to God and see things as they truly are in God. In the light of God we come to see the inside of things, the truth of that moment, that experience when it is touched and transfigured by God.”
We need to allow God to transfigure the ordinary into the extraordinary so that our work, our love, our suffering become charged with His glory.
When we bring our own personal sins, grief, our sense of sorrow and loss to the Cross, we bring them into the story of God’s grief, sorrow and loss and this is able to bring healing to us and new possibilities for our lives. This is the Good Friday that leads to Easter Day. This is holding together what Alun Evans calls the “peep into hell” and the “vision of Heaven”.
There are no easy answers to the pain and suffering of individuals and communities, but we are called to this difficult “holding together”: recognition of pain, suffering and loss and the transforming power of the celebration of God’s love, God’s hope, and God’s future in the person of Jesus Christ. The Feast of the Resurrection is both a personal challenge and also a social challenge, for Easter is not just about individuals but also about communities.
The message of the Easter angel is “He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see Him.” May God grant us those moments of disclosure that we may recognise the Risen Christ amongst us and hear His voice calling us to act in His name for the good of all.
“We are an Easter people”, said St Augustine, and Alleluia is our song.”