As we head towards Lent my mind has gone into reverse!
Rather than what I might give up, I’ve started to wonder what I want to cling to, what I really value. Is there anything I never want to let go of? I suppose for many people the first thing to come to mind will not be a thing but a person. And I begin to reflect. Of all the people I know, or have known, who have loved me and whom I have loved… and I’m brought up short. Immediately I’m conscious of our humanity. Every day we form memories – good and bad. What we do today will be what we remember tomorrow. We may remember some things for a lifetime. But all of us have been born. All of us will die. Some people we love have already already died. Life, for all it holds is transient. Yet we hold memories. We share grief. A poem written some years ago began:
All my life I've had acquaintances.
And some friends.
A varied tapestry of faces,
none permanent,
born and dying.
Parents gave me birth,
both now dead.
Child born
and laid to rest.
Life has taught me to expect loss, sooner or later. I owe so much to so many. I hold memories, and they are invaluable. But if this is a bit bleak for you, for me it is realistic. So what will I hold to? Let me share three memories:
I looked out on the sunset. The sky, deep red, but fading, could not be captured by a camera’s lens, held for eternity. I mused. Different wavelengths of light refracted by the atmosphere, received by a retina, passing through a tangle of neurones, conducted by chemical and physiological interactions, perceived by something we might label consciousness. And is this all? Later I played with water colours, fluid, wet on wet, running into one another out of control, unpredictable.
This was nearer to what I believed I saw. But this did not explain or make sense of what I saw, of what felt. And a realisation rose rather than forced itself on me of something ‘other’. Call that conversion if you will. It was a glimpse of the ‘other’, I will go on calling it that for want of anything better, that changed the direction of my life. To that I will hold.
Then with my first real telescope. Marvelling at the myriad of stars in which our sun and the tumbling planets surrounding it are set.
There yesterday, today and forever. This will outlast me.
Even if climate change is ultimately catastrophic those stars will be there. Beyond the point when our sun dies, compressed in a black hole, stars, light years from ours will burn brightly. Sheer wonder.
But I began the title of this reflection with ‘seas’. And that poem to which I’ve referred ended with these words:
Left again to my earliest memories,
to the rising of the sun
and its setting;
to waxing of the moon
and its waning;
the movement of the waters,
the crashing of the waves,
the constancy of stars;
to the generation of my faith.
In this dynamic patchwork
I find my safety,
lodge securely;
and so,
in death,
I will return again
to the friendly sea
and the sky.
The seas lap round the continents. I was born within 400yards of the sea. I long for the sea. And whenever I can go near it the swell, the movement, the scent, the changing light, constant, yet infinitely varied feels like home.
And as I reflect on this creation in which I have been placed, nurtured, grown I return, as some of you will already have guessed, to two passages of scripture. Seas, stars and sunsets remind me of that something, that ‘other’ that we name God, that is LOVE…
‘You, LORD, are all I have, and you give me all I need; my future is in your hands’(Good News Bible, Psalm 16 verse 5) and ‘…I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God (Romans 8: 38-39). Amen to that.
To these things, to this, I will cling, through Lent and beyond.
Grace & Peace, Andrew
Text, Watercolour Painting and iPad Painting all copyright Andrew Pratt. This reflection first used in the Mid-Cheshire Methodist Circuit 2024
