A Pastoral Letter from Sam Rushton, Archdeacon of York
In these days of Lent, our walk through ‘the wilderness’ continues. Wilderness is a recurrent theme in the Bible. Whether as a community – like the people of Israel fleeing their Egyptian slavery – or as individuals, many find themselves in those places where all that they had relied upon or taken for granted is stripped away and they are left to fend for themselves in an empty place. And in those places of deep alone-ness, they find God, the God who went before them into that dark and empty space and inhabited it with himself.
We are not alone. This is the great triumphant shout of our Christian hope. We are not alone. Our God goes with us. The Son of Man came to share our sorrows, our joys, our burdens. The Holy Spirit binds us together in love. We are not alone and we do not need to be afraid.
The period of wilderness feels like a little death, a stripping away of physical reality so that all that is left is just me and what I carry with me. It is a place where I come face-to-face with who I am when all the ‘stuff’ that I thought was important no longer is. When I look back to the world I left behind, I realise most of it was easier to let go of than I thought and I mourn the wasted time, the people I could have spent more time with. And I hope and I pray for the time yet to come, when the journey through the wilderness is over.
But if the gospels teach us anything, it is that the resurrection body is not the same as the body that died. New life is not the same as the old life with a second wind. My prayer for the Church is that it will allow itself to be changed by its prolonged journey through the wilderness this year.
