One of Paul Simon’s songs begins with these few words

‘April come she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain’

Now we have reached the first days of the month of April, the time in the Northern hemisphere when we greet the season of Spring, with all its implications and promise of new life after the depths of Winter are left behind.

Our days of Lent move towards Easter Sunday, this year late in the month, April 21st. Each Lenten day is a stepping stone towards the 3rd day of the Triduum and the glory of the Risen Lord. After witnessing the Transfiguration Peter, James and John were told - "Don’t tell anyone what you have seen, until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead." That must have only added to their amazement by what they had witnessed.

We are fortunate that the polar axis of rotation of our earth is tilted from the orbital plane of our annual journey round the Sun for without that 23 degree tilt we wouldn’t have the change of the Seasons. Just as the Seasons alter so do the pattern of our own days and ways as we move from childhood through to old age. Nothing stays the same. And that is good, each new circumstance is a challenge, asking questions, offering new opportunities. The significance of global warming and the consequence of climate change becomes more apparent with each passing year.

How has our faith in the Risen Christ changed with our own lived experience, for surely it has? Tempered by our passing days, faced with the inevitable hopes and difficulties, joys and disappointments, we do not come through unscathed. The individual burden that each of us must carry varies like the Seasons. Sometimes it is light and casual, at other times heavy and tiresome. So what do we do?

Our faith asks us to turn to prayer. That is very easy to say, much harder to accomplish for our prayer life is also on a journey, changing with our experience. The prayers we learnt as a child remain with us, yet they are only the soil in which our prayer life grows.

Sometimes we pray with others, using words that are known in common. Sometimes we pray alone, silently reflecting on the mystery of God and his love for us. We might kneel or sit or stand depending on where we are. Above all we should listen to love of God in whose presence we are.

We are told at the start of Mark’s Gospel that ‘Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.’ Taking time in a place of solitude before the light of Dawn tells us something about preparation, taking good care to recognise the presence of the Lord. And that is an experience that each of us has to find for ourselves, somewhere where we can listen in the space between words and be taught by the silence.

After the tragic killings during Friday Prayers in the Christchurch Mosques, the response of the people was to offer public prayer, for those who had died and for their families. I wrote these brief words a few days after it happened.

Friday prayer

       Many leaves fell

from that distant tree,

gathered in the breeze of Friday prayer

                a fragrance of life cut short

scattered by the interruption

of a sudden, senseless storm.

Sirens screamed in surrounding streets

                 echoes of their floating fall

their outraged pain,

   their endless call.

Yet in numerous interviews came repeated words of forgiveness for the perpetrator of those casual deaths.

Reflecting back to the attacked on a Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine were killed when a visitor joined in their prayer I was reminded of a song recently released by Joan Baez.

‘A young man came to a house of prayer/They did not ask what brought him there/He was not friend, he was not kin/But they opened the door and let him in.

And for an hour the stranger stayed/He sat with them and seemed to pray/But then the young man drew a gun/And killed nine people, old and young.

In Charleston in the month of June/The mourners gathered in a room/The President came to speak some words/And the cameras rolled and the nation heard/But no words could say what must be said/For all the living and the dead
So on that day and in that place/The President sang Amazing Grace/My President sang Amazing Grace.’

May this Lent bring us all to a greater awareness of our need to pray, not only for ourselves but for others who find it hard to pray. 

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