joncoe
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10:07:53 am on September 29, 2008 | # |
As my microphone etiquette might not be quite what it could be, I thought I’d post here what I said in the introduction to last night’s service. Or tried to say. More or less, anyway.
Do we perhaps place overly spiritual meaning onto mundane things, things which have entirely natural origins? Or to avoid this, do we perhaps go about our lives ignoring the value – the miracle – in natural, apparently everyday things? Do we blank out thoughts of God, God who is before, behind, beyond – and in – them?
Does God fit into the gaps in our knowledge and understanding? Does God shrink in the face of what we know and understand about the universe – or rather does our concept of God grow the more we find out about creation?
This week is the penultimate in the series on the elements, and we’re looking at water. Water has huge metaphorical as well as literal, spiritual as well as physical, significance in the Bible – and though we may not always notice as readily as perhaps we should, in our lives too.
Water quenches our thirst, one of our essential requirements; it washes us; it feeds plants; we produce it from our eyes when expressing extreme emotion – which perhaps isn’t surprising, as our bodies are made up of somewhere in the region of 60-70% water; it is used in a whole variety of religious activities – the cleansing being represented most obviously in baptism in Christianity…
But of course this is not all. Water has negative connotations too, floods and tidal waves for example bring death and devastation often to vast areas, the power of the ocean (or even smaller amounts of the stuff) is overwhelming. Water can – and all too often does – carry life-threatening diseases.
And it can also have ambiguous connotations, when we consider what it shows us of the cyclic aspects of life.
Just thinking for a moment about water, you realise how much more there is to it than just the turning on of a tap.
A number of stations have been set up exploring some of these aspects of water – and more. The idea being for us to take some time and meditate on the significance of the apparently insignificant. Of course we know it’s not insignificant, but it might be something we all too easily take for granted.
In the face of the imagery, spiritual and otherwise, you may like to consider (among other things) – is God in the gaps, or rather, is God constantly dancing tantalisingly beyond our grasp, above, beneath, around and through the gaps. And the bits in between…?
