June’s letter to the parish comes from the keboard of Rev Steve:
Digital media has many benefits. There were 18,000 views of the Simister Festival on our online platforms. Yet our mobile phones and laptops can also make us impatient. Give our favourite search-engine a difficult question, or set our calculator a complicated bit of maths, and we roll our eyes, and look up at the ceiling, if we have nothing after five seconds!
We live in a world impatient for instant responses to issues that require sustained and complex thought – issues that can’t be solved by smart one-line comments on social media or swift military action.
Where are the voices that counsel patience and humility when seeking resolution to problems that have no quick fix without a cost to our humanity?
Woven into our timetable of Easter, Ascension and Pentecost, we have in this country the Christian tradition of Rogation-tide. The three days before Ascension Day are Rogation Days, whose name comes from the Latin verb, to ask: rogare. These are the days that accompany the sowing of seed in the fields where, with the farming community, we ask God for a good harvest that we may distribute fairly. With the request comes the patience to wait, as the seeds are nurtured through the summer, before the moment of truth and judgement, when the crops are ready for harvest. This pattern, this cycle, is part of the mystery and beauty of God’s creation, of which we are part, and to which we belong. This is expressed with awe in these words attributed to God after the Great Flood, after Noah gives thanks for his rescue:
“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” (Genesis 8.22).
So how am I to live in those periods of waiting, between seedtime and harvest, between question and answer, between dilemma and resolution?
I think it may be by living in a condition of trust or faith – the Hebrew word “emunah”, representing the trust you place in an aeroplane pilot before take-off (with you in the cabin) or a surgeon before an operation (with you on the table). To help this trust, I may name and hand over my concerns to God: “Cast your cares upon God because he cares for you.” (1 Peter 5.7).
I may wait in silence, maybe repeating a short line of scripture about God’s goodness: “Wait on God alone in stillness, O my soul; for in him is my hope.” (Psalm 62.5). I may cry out from within to God: “I will call upon the Most High God, the God who fulfils his purpose for me.” (Psalm 57.3). And I can do this in the gaps of everyday life – at the bus-stop, in the supermarket queue, waiting for the lift or (perish the thought) when the computer screen is unresponsive and all I see is a little blue circle that will never stop spinning…!
Rev Steve
St Margaret's Church Prestwich 