It’s time to contemplate our lives
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We processed through the High Altar, past the shrine to St Alban into the Lady Chapel.
We had completed the service where we remembered the Last Supper and Jesus's washing of the disciples' feet. It was as if in the act of walking from the lit part of the cathedral to the Lady Chapel, lit only by a few candles, we had moved from the Upper Room into the Garden of Gethsemane.
Here in the garden, we would hold a vigil while Jesus waited for the inevitable. Of course, we know that these events have already occurred yet somehow we reach within ourselves to appreciate it from where we now are. This whole Easter thing may well be more about us than anything else. Yes, the focus is on Jesus’s betrayal and being killed because he represented a threat. But it is how we interact with the story that will determine what we receive from it.
Each day we live as a different people. Different in that one day shapes us. In a year we are different to how we were this time last year. Different due to the experiences and events that have occurred hence the need to give time to our spiritual selves. During this time we have the opportunity to fully deal with matters that have been left unfinished.
As I sat in the Lady Chapel perhaps as events went through Jesus’s mind of his life I was having my own recall. I just let the brain bring to me whatever it wanted. I noted a theme, it consisted of schools and educational establishments I attended. Not for the academic studies but for the people I met there. It also consisted of churches I had been part of. I think ‘spiritual communities’ is a better expression of the word ‘church’. Again it was not about the teaching but the people I met.
And then I saw incidents of regret. I hope I have largely dealt with them yet they still arose. Perhaps I have been influenced by the wrongs I have done in that it brought me to a boundary that I crossed. For some of us, it has only been as we crossed a boundary that we realised the full effect of our actions. That can be life-changing for the person on the receiving end, it can also be life-changing for the individual who crossed the boundary. For some, it will mean they live out the rest of their lives to ensure they never again cause such pain. Could this be seen as turning a negative into a positive? I remind myself that I like to believe that whatever happens to us ‘we work it until it turns from a negative until a positive’.
Perhaps as we remember Jesus’s last supper and the washing of his friends’ feet we are also remembering our own lives, our own betrayals, our own injustices both as the one trespassed and the trespasser. We remember to remind ourselves how easy it is to go off track and in so doing cause pain.
So I remember the people who have brought me to the place I now occupy, not only those who have encouraged but also those I have sinned against they too have influenced where I am in this story.
As I opened my eyes the chapel seemed brighter, the mist that had been was no more.
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