30 April 4th after Easter: Acts 2:42-end, 1 Peter 2:19-end and John 10:1-10
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry has been described as a deep dive into the souls of a retired couple or as a sentimental tear-jerker undermined by its own implausibility.
As is often the way with films, the reality is somewhere in-between. It is beautifully shot with moments of tenderness, restraint, feeling; sometimes it tips out of kilter, at others we flinch or cringe.
We meet Harold and his wife Maureen, in their sub-urban home with its net curtains and familiar routines. The conversation is as sparse as the house.
A letter from a dying former colleague triggers not only a memory of a person but a life-time of what has been left unsaid in the face of tragedy, grief and needing to survive. Harold’s response is to write.
So far, so ordinary. Rhythms of life bound by convention.
Having missed the post and following a conversation about hope with a teenage cashier, Harold’s response is to walk from Devon to Berwick-upon-Tweed.
To walk 500 miles, as The Proclaimers once sang, seems for Harold to be highly unlikely.
Writing in The Spectator, one critic suggests that: ‘Released from his own passivity, Harold is waking up to life.’
There is kindness and judgement, loneliness and company; the burden and security of things; the vulnerability and freedom of letting go.
There is a media storm of the kind that celebrates what seems remarkable if not fully understood; there’s the intimacy of phone calls home, with awkward truth telling, and the way we never fully know ourselves or each other.
It unveils the effort and instinctiveness of the ordinary and plots a landscape of faith and redemption. There are names and voices, being known and led into a process of truth, love, forgiveness; a letting go to find life again. Life in all its fullness maybe.
During a school assembly, the then Bishop of Hereford, encouraged 600 young people to remember John 10:10 - I have come that you may have life and have it in abundance. It stayed with me because it sounded so full of hope and possibility; a phrase we hold on in the face of the ordinary and the unlikely.
Perhaps though it’s the imagery circling that memorable phrase that we are invited to sit with. Images that are mobile, shifting, multifaceted, familiar yet strange.
We are invited to attend to the voice of the shepherd in the face of danger, risk and vulnerability; to know that voice as we make decisions which shape our life.
Who do we listen to, trust or follow?
Image: Sarah West - Visio Lectio
David Ford describes the way this passage draws us deeper into the Bible and relationship with God which is ‘life in community, vocation of love, trust and compassion; that share in eternal abundant life of God’. The world is indeed in need of such life.
We live in a world with a great multitude of voices: voices which make claims about who we are and our worth; voices directing how we should act; painting pictures about who we should view the other.
Against this, Jesus paints pictures which enlarge our imagination: he names the threats of thieves or indifference of hired hands; but he also promises the faithfulness of one who is at the gate - knowing us and calling by name; leading us and laying down his life in love for us. In the words of Peter, however much we struggle and endure, we are healed by Jesus’ wounds, by his life.
“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they know me.”
The basis for abundant life is this God-centred image of justice, peace and blessing. A love that sets us on the way to be a pastoral people; a people who walk with others and advocate for them.
In the face of all that threatens to consume or destroy, all that perplexes or grieves us, there is also more faith, hope and love than we dare to imagine. For Harold, it was perhaps less in the validation of his cause by a crowd wearing pilgrim t-shirts, but in the woman who tended his blistered and battered feet, inviting him to rest.
He sees her - and she sees him. Together, embodying something of what the writer Henri Nouwen said: ‘to pray, to listen to the voice of the one who calls us the “beloved” is to learn that that voice excludes no one’.
Here the love of God revealed in the life of Jesus gives shape to our lives through the work of the Spirit. It is when we see, in ordinary and unlikely ways, the ‘miraculous flowing through weathered hands’ as Willie Jennings vividly puts it.
He sees in the book of Acts, a tentative and fleeting moment when in the normal, daily routines of community, the immense implications of life in the Spirit are embodied.
He says: ‘time, talent and treasures, the trinity of possessions we know so well, would feel the pull of this holy vortex’.
In Acts we glimpse what it was like to feel the power of the Spirit drawing our lives, plans, purposes and stories into a new direction.
They prayed, listened, broke bread and shared what they had. Such a ‘holy communalism’ was a moment of possibility. We know that people will offer up money or possessions to a cause that matters to them. Yet, we are also called to offer up ourselves - bodies bound together and sustained by the body of Christ.
In each Eucharist, we are given just enough. A wafer of fragility and yet abundance.
In fragments of food, sips of wine and moments of blessing, we are drawn into new life together. We are drawn away from death and towards abundant life; we are prompted to make our own unlikely pilgrimage in seeking the end of poverty, hunger and despair.
The voice that calls us beloved, excludes no one. And we might continue, it’s a voice that changes everyone. A voice which reminds us that we are bound together in love for the sake of others, for the sake of the world.
The bonds of communion are given life by the breath of the Spirit - what Jennings calls a ‘holy wind’ which blows through structures and settled ways of life.
That holy breath stirs up generosity in our hearts - as we look to resource the worship and ministry of this place. How might we give generously of the trinity of our possessions - our time, talent and treasures? Giving that we might serve in the world as a pilgrim people; and sharing that we might draw others in the holy vortex of God’s forgiving, restoring, consoling love.
© Julie Gittoes 2023
