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CONNECTING DURING SELF-ISOLATION: THE WYLYE AND TILL VALLEY BENEFICE SHARES A ‘QUIET DAY AT HOME’

The measures we are having to take in order to help slow down the spread of Covid 19 mean we need to start looking at doing things differently, more creatively.  These difficult times provide both challenges and opportunities - the one ultimately making us stronger and more resilient; the other opening fresh approaches to both routine and special activities.  When our Quiet Day at the Langford Lakes had to be cancelled, we were invited by our priest-in charge Jonathan Plows to set up our own Quiet Day at home on 31 March, using material he provided.  We were 21 altogether, using a mix of media, from print-outs to pdf, you-tube to crayons.

The theme was ‘Thin Places’, drawing on Celtic Christianity’s tradition of seeking to experience God more directly, usually in a physical place where the boundary between heaven and earth is especially thin and the divine can be sensed more readily.  Throughout life, we are drawn to places that bring calm or inspiration, sanctuary or distraction.  Wherever those places are, they effect some kind of positive change in us - they transform us, so that when we leave them, we feel all the better for having been there.
"Jesus took with him Peter and James and led them up a high mountain by themselves.  And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun......" (Matthew 17: 1-2)

After Morning Prayer, the day followed a repeated pattern of reflection, Bible readings, prayer and activity, ending in a (socially-distanced) walk.  We explored Biblical stories of locations where heaven and earth met, Eden and Sinai for example, Celtic thin places, such as Iona and Lindisfarne, and those with which we are more regularly familiar - churches and cathedrals.  As the day progressed, it felt like we were creating our own thin places, our own intimacy with God, connected both with the divine and those travelling with us, "content with living the questions, without having to know all the answers" (to quote Buechner).

Perhaps our current greatly restricted circumstances might be seen as a chance to discover our own thin places, to be transformed and inspired by them.  For although we do not know what lies ahead, we are fairly sure that life will not be the same.  A poem by Jenny Bridgman called 'Thin Places' ends in a verse that sums up both life in general and the unprecedented times we are experiencing:

"We do not leave unchanged
If change is to become ourselves.
Ahead: a thousand moments of transfiguration,
Each one a death - and resurrection - in itself,
As we are both transformed and transform,
Sacred moment by sacred moment."

May the world come through all this lastingly transformed for the better.

Yvonne Allen