Director's Message (July 2017)
Recently I returned to my office after lunch and realised that I had l left my glasses somewhere in my lunchtime travels. I retraced my steps and found that the glasses had been placed in the middle of the table, now cleared, where I had drunk a coffee. As I approached the table the owner looked up from behind the coffee machine, smiled and gave me the thumbs up sign – pointing to the glasses. I was overwhelmed. In the rough and tumble of the working day this small act of kindness was unexpected. It served to soften the sharp edge of the day and to remind me that we live in a world of unexpected blessing.
I was reminded that somewhere along the way on that day I had closed my eyes to the many blessings that surrounded me and this act of kindness jolted them open. Our capacity to see the blessings of our days can be clouded by so many things. We can be weighed down by trouble or grief. The day begins with news about world-wide stories of human tragedy and suffering which can seem relentless and cause us to feel powerless. We may feel traumatised by the knowledge of the great abuses that have occurred in our Church and feel heart-broken for the survivors who live with the effects. Perhaps we feel terribly sad about declining church attendance in our local parish or the results about religion in the latest census. We may just feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the issues living in the contemporary world raise for us.
But I wonder if the ability to see the holiness of the world is one of the great challenges we face. In the midst of our daily struggles to live as though we truly believe that goodness overcomes evil and that in our own little ways we do make a difference. To keep our eyes ‘fixed on the Lord’ so that we are able to recognise and respond to the presence of God in the ordinariness of our lives. And to remember that because of Jesus, the world really is a graced place.
John O ‘Donohue in his poem, The Inner History of a Day, expresses it this way:
… We seldom notice how each day is a holy place
Where the Eucharist of the ordinary happens,
Transforming our broken fragments
Into an eternal continuity that keeps us.So may our hearts be opened to seeing the holiness of the day, confident in the knowledge that our God walks with us, sees what we see, feels what we feel and has the transformative capacity to hold us in the anxieties of the times.
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Cathy Jenkins
Director
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