The Reverend Philip Banks writes:

May 2008

“We had the experience but missed the meaning”

It is a strange time – the period covering Holy Week, Whitsun, Ascension and through to Trinity and Corpus Christi – perhaps a ‘supernatural’ time for the church. For all the celebrations during these weeks are to do with God as he is known to Christians in Jesus: we are invited not just to cast our minds back to some remote past, but rather to see how the life of heaven can break into our present daily life – particularly in the sacrament of the Eucharist, celebrated at the end of the month at Corpus Christi.

For most of us, as we lead busy or distracted lives, connecting with the ‘life of heaven’ can be a hard thing to achieve! T S Eliot, in ‘The Four Quartets’, summed it up well when he wrote: “we had the experience but missed the meaning”. In our experiencing all the moving services of the Easter season, do we really allow ourselves to grasp the true meaning (for ourselves and for the world) of the events we celebrate? We often talk about ‘going to church’. But I wonder how helpful that phrase really is. As Christians, far from ‘going to church’, we indeed are called to be the church: we are people somehow intimately related to Jesus’ risen presence in the world.

But… we need to remind ourselves, in Eliot’s words, that we may well have “had the experience” yet “missed the meaning”. As members of the church, we always need to find ways of seeking for ourselves the true meaning of our faith and trust in God – so that we can indeed try to ‘be’ the church to those around us. Hence the Lent courses, the Coggeshall Lectures, the Confirmation courses. Hence the children’s Communion Classes, the House Groups. Hence sermons or young people’s groups – and hence, above all, the prayer of silence and of the worship that we offer day by day and week by week, as we try to be still, and to understand these amazing mysteries of Jesus Christ.

So – this month sees the church celebrations of Ascension, Whitsun, Trinity and Corpus Christi I pray that these may be times which can lead us onwards in our faith. May we always resist the temptation to ‘rest in the past’, or go to church expecting to find only what we found last time – or just to find what we knew years ago – or what we once heard but didn’t pay proper attention to.

I believe that, in some difficult-to-understand way, we are all in the process of becoming the person that God wants us to be. May we indeed seek to be people who “miss the meaning” a bit less often, and to understand more fully what God wants us to be, both as individuals and as a church family. May we seek to be truly transformed by him, yet in the sure knowledge of God’s power and his encircling love for us in our journey of life.

This comes with my love and prayers,

Fr Philip Banks

picture: ‘Coming of the Spirit’ by Julee Lowe, stained glass designer and artist.