John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

From Lost Sheep to One Love - the path of all Disciples

   ... Addressing the 50,000 people from the One Love Manchester stage (and the global live television audience) Ariana Grande said, “The kind of love and unity you’re displaying is the medicine the world really needs right now.”

It’s not lost on me that the One Love concert took place at Pentecost (festival of liberation for the Jewish people, which Christians celebrate as a time when the Holy Spirit came to the disparate crowds in Jerusalem, bringing unity through mutual understanding). It’s keenly impressed on me that the entire period between the bombing and the One Love concert coincided exactly with the international ‘wave of prayer’ promoted by our Anglican archbishops and embraced by people everywhere, including in our little village churches here, under the banner ‘Thy Kingdom Come’. Notable also that the Muslim community were also turning to prayer, fasting and good works in that period of time, coinciding with the month of Ramadan. Could these all be connected? Is the spirit of love and unity demonstrated by Manchester’s young people in some way an outworking of the prayers of all people for the rule, the ‘kingdom’, of goodness, right relationships and peace, to come into the world?

Maybe this is fanciful but I think it’s worth embracing - it’s a dream I will not let anyone steal from me. For I think that the task of all praying people, all people of goodwill, in response to acts of terror, is to work - young and old together - to find ways to strengthen and deepen “the kind of love and unity” displayed in Manchester, to help each church, mosque, school, village hall, to become ‘One Love workshops’ where we learn how to turn this present spirit into a rooted way of life. ...

From my talk today, From Lost Sheep to One Love - the path of all Disciples. Also the theme of my Letter to the Editor in this week's Church Times under the heading Responses to terrorism: One Love, and the command to love enemies:

The Spirit of Unity and Diversity

Sadly, too often our forebears ... reinforced violent, static, dualist, hierarchical and exclusive understandings of God. But it’s still not too late. If we open our hearts, we can feel the Spirit guiding us now to let the healing teaching of the Trinity continue its joyful revolution. Perhaps we are now ready to bear it … and to dare to practise it. Because if God is not violent, static, dualist, hierarchical or exclusive, neither should we be.

To join the movement of the Spirit is to let our trinitarian tradition continue to live, learn and grow … so the hostile one-versus-otherness of Earth can become more like the hospitable one-anotherness of heaven. From beginning to end, the Spirit leads us into vibrant diversity and joyful unity in beautiful harmony.

- from Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road By Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation and Activation, ch. 45, “The Spirit of Unity and Diversity”. It is a chapter on the doctrine of the Trinity, that the Trinity shifts our understanding away from God as violent, static, dualist, hierarchical, and exclusive. I used it (slightly altered, in its entirety) as my Trinity Sunday talk.

That's the Spirit

The Missing People's Choir, the people who sang "Don't Look Back in Anger" in St Ann's Square, the underdog supporters winning at Wembley, a tube carriage of passengers defending two young women from racial abuse - and all young ones who see visions, all old ones who dream dreams - the stars of my Pentecost talk today, That's the Spirit.