Beginnings and Endings: Day after day, everyday.

Sometimes there seem to be no beginnings and endings – just things going on as before – on and on.

‘Everything that happens
has happened before
and all that will be has already been –
God does everything
over and over again.’ (Ecclesiastes 3:15)

The writer notes that this cycle can seem like a blessing and a curse.

E-Reflections: Beginnings and Endings (Week 3).  A comment on Haiti

Nothing on earth makes sense.

‘I looked again and saw people being ill treated everywhere on earth.  They were crying, but no one was there to offer comfort, and those who ill treated them were powerful.  I said to myself, ‘The dead are better off than the living.  But those who have never been born are better off than anyone else, because they have never seen the terrible things that happen on this earth….Once again I saw that nothing on earth made sense’ (Ecclesiastes 4:1-4)

The earthquake in Haiti is not understandable and for those suffering in Haiti can there be comfort?  Such a violent ending and shaking of lives.  This is terrible indeed.  But I find comfort in these hard words in Ecclesiastes.  Earlier the writer comments, ‘he (God) puts questions in our minds about the past and the future’.  We don’t necessarily get answers.

E-Reflections: Beginnings and Endings (Week 2) .  The Tremor of danger and the sense of promise

Hurry! Get up! Flee

There is always a danger of sentimentality with the Holy Family stories, of receiving only a babyish message that asks little of us, that does not challenge or console us.  This scene, the Flight from Egypt, would often show them ‘embraced by welcoming trees, serenaded by circling flocks of angels and bathed in a tender warm light’.  This honest, realistic painting harshly shows a family that are dog tired and exposed, jolted into an hasty and frightening exit.

E-Reflections: Beginnings and Endings (Week 1)

Matthew 2: 12 they returned to their country by another route

It’s said that the first part of our adult journey of life and faith is to leave home and the second part to return home - and that the routes taken are quite different.

The season of Epiphany taking us up to Lent started today. Epiphany, meaning to shine upon, reveal or to appear, manifest, here refers to God revealing Jesus to the Gentiles as God and Messiah, his appearance heralding the beginning of a new order, of both a life and a death.

From The Journey of the Magi, T S Eliot

were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Question: Where and/or what is home?

Image: Journey of the Magi, James Jacques Joseph Tissot

E-reflections Introduction

At the start of the new year we embark on our first set of E-Reflections, on the topic of Beginnings and Endings.  These will be brief and hopefully evocative.  They will be weekly word and image based meditations expressing our desire to foster reflective practice in a daily life often mobbed with urgent and demanding voices.  My Tufty Club’s* motto of STOP.  LOOK.  LISTEN comes to mind!