Troubled Lent focus continued

 

Having just posted my last reflection, the pinned tweet at the top of the twitter feed of Michael Sadgrove (a retired Dean of Durham) popped up:

Not to give in to despair, denial or fantasy, but to accept that the present is what it is, to do all we can to work within it for good, & to nurture the imagination to glimpse the possibilities that point to a future of better things for our world, our peoples & ourselves.

This seemed to me to be clearer than I had been about the way suffering and glory are in inextricable intermingled.

The shorter first part of his sentence is about facing difficult flawed painful inevitable reality as it is – not seeking to escape by giving up (despair), ignoring it (denial) or wishful thinking (fantasy).

The second longer part of his sentence is about looking for hints of the potential of glory in there as well (although he doesn’t name faith or God explicitly) – working with and nurturing imagination, glimpses, possibilities.

It turns out that it is Christian hope he talking about, as a twinned tweet makes clear:

Trying (struggling) to find a way of expressing hope that’s realistic rather than fanciful in dark & dangerous times.

Something further clarified by his comment on this:

To own up: I find a lot of the talk about “hope” is unexamined & lazy, no more than a vacuous kind of wishful thinking or cup-half-full-optimism.  Far from being grounded in present reality, it is rather a flight from it.  Spiritual leaders have a special responsibility here.

The language I’ve most often valued is that of Gospel possibilities (‘In this mess, following this mistake, faced by this cruelty, knowing this sabotage to our hopes, what could be the next Gospel inspired step?’) and Kingdom seeking (‘What signs or hints of God’s preferred and promised ways, of God’s glory, might we now see or suspect and celebrate and act towards?).

Suffering is real.  The vision of God is real.  Neither simply trumps the other.  God-in-Christ’s journey through the cross entwines them.

The pictures are taken as near as I can get to it of a tree which in the recent winds fell from within the Rectory grounds here into a neighbouring field.