Letter from Clare
November the month of remembering- All Saints, All Souls, Remembrance Sunday, even Guy Fawkes. This year in our 3 parishes, many of us will be remembering loved ones, friends, and members of our families, in a particularly poignant and painful way, for this year and these last few months have been full of tragedy. Many tears have been shed, anger has been deep and horribly real, guilt for some has gnawed cruelly in their innermost thoughts, and oh so many questions have been asked, "Why, why, why"? There is a Jewish book in our bookshelves, which is called "When bad things happen to good people". Written by a rabbi who lost his son as a teenager, it is his attempt to wrestle with the age-old question of suffering, how can God allow this to happen? How can God indeed? But perhaps it is the wrong question to be asking. Perhaps a more appropriate and useful question to ask, is, "where is God in this suffering"?
At the heart of the Christian faith is a God, who in Jesus cried out with his own question "My God, my God why have you forsaken me"? As a human being Jesus experienced the absence of God. He knew fear "Take this cup away from me"; he knew that sense of desolation, which we experience at the loss of someone we love dearly. God in Jesus, the one who came to share our humanity, is not the decider of fate, but the one who shares in the agony of all that it means to be human. Where is God in all of this, not a divine dictator or controller of strings of a puppet like creation, but a God who weeps with us, a God who understands our anger, our questions, our fears, our guilt, yet can pray "Father, forgive them".
The story of Good Friday and Jesus' suffering can never be seen in isolation from the story of Easter, they are the 2 sides of a coin. In the Easter story Jesus' words to his disciples were words of peace. He offers us those same words, as he shows and shares with us his wounds again, in our own woundedness and hurting.
The Jewish community have a tradition at a funeral, that at the bun fight afterwards, the family are not supposed to take food for themselves Other people have to feed them, symbolizing the task we all have towards one another of loving and serving those who are in need. This may take a very practical form of visiting, cooking, sending a card, writing a letter, but most importantly accepting people as they are and loving them through the darkness.
Can I also say thank you to all the people who have supported me through their kind words, and their prayers. Your support has been enormously appreciated.
Clare Sanders