This morning I left my hotel on Grace Church Street and began the first hundred-or-so yard leg of my 4,000 mile journey back stateside. On the way to the station I took a slight detour to have one final look at St Mary Woolnoth Church where John Newton, the author of the hymn Amazing Grace, was pastor three centuries ago. The doors were just about to be opened to the communicants for morning prayer. I looked a last time at the wind-buffeted, and now-exhausted-sooted ship on the back of the church, an obvious reference to the many years Newton served as a seafaring captain before taking Anglican orders. I then glanced down the tiny back alley street of Lombard toward the church clock immortalized in Eliot's The Waste Land.
Upon my departure for England three weeks ago, I asked everyone that they pray I would eat and drink deeply of this experience and that my soul would find spiritual sustenance in the places I would visit and the people I would meet. I give thanks for all the prayers and am pleased they were indeed answered. My soul is greater for having been on this journey, first together with Irie and later alone, experiencing the history of so many holy places, and having reflected on what it means to be human with so many deep and faithful Christians from around the world. It was a moveable feast, these past weeks, and I am profoundly grateful for having taken part.
Now I am back at St Mary's, where the feast began, and now also ends. The clock dings. It is not yet nine as in Eliot's poem; but it is time to go home.
I make my way down to Monument station and am immediately hit with the reality that the last three weeks have not been a feast for all. I pass by a homeless man still asleep in the underground station. He is cradled in the fetal position inside a sleeping bag with his thumb in his mouth. The homeless have been one of the constant sights I have seen everywhere I have been on this trip. Their presence has been a constant reminder of the great human need that is always among us; and all along the way of this trip I have been an observer of how they are treated and cared for both by church and society. This morning, passersby gently drop coins into a folded navy blank set out in front of him. Someone has offered up a half dozen donuts. In this dimly lit London tunnel, all judgement has ceased. What is offered before this man -- before this image of God -- is pure human compassion.
I come to the turnstile entrance which leads down into the tube and ask the attendant how I might pay for a single ride to Heathrow with cash rather than credit. She tells me the machine is broken but I can go ahead and get on the train and take it to the terminus and tell the attendant the machine was broken. "They will let you pay there -- or just pass for free." I am uncertain about this idea knowing that it sounds at best technically illegal; but after a moment's hesitation I decide to risk it because I figure in the end it will be worth writing about either way -- not the least if I am apprehended by a British bobby. This then sends me into a reflection about all that it has meant for me to write and share my experience abroad with friends back home these last few weeks.
The last Sunday I was at home the lectionary reading was from Mark 6 where Jesus, after an intense season of ministry by his disciples, tells them to "Come away and rest awhile." They are tired and worn and have had no leisure even to eat for themselves the Scripture says. So they get into their own wind-worn vessel and head across the Sea of Galilee in search of respite. I told the congregation this really was a coincidence and I was not just cherry picking scripture to justify a getaway across the pond. I also begged them not to do what the crowd of 5,000 did in the story -- hurrying around the lake to meet Jesus and the disciples when they came ashore for their vacation. "If you're there waiting for us at the gate when we touch down in London," I told one guy friend from church, "Irie is going to kill you."
But in ways that could not have imagined or perhaps welcomed and which definitely would not have even been possible just a few years ago, the congregation has been here in England with me the whole time -- through the web. Just a couple of days before I left a friend asked me if I was going to be blogging during the trip. I told him I didn't know but was thinking about it. "You should," he said, "because people will like that. And it'll be good."
And with that the people had run around the pond to meet us.
If someone had told me that I would write 13 posts about my trip, some of them multiple in parts, and many of them over 10 paragraphs in length I am pretty sure I would have responded that in spite of what my friend said it wouldn't be good. I was going away, to be apart and rest awhile and the idea that I would be writing this much and having friends encourage me to write more sounds on the face of it far from the whole idea of a sabbatical.
Yet during the course of the trip I kept thinking of what happened in the story and what Jesus told his disciples when they came ashore and saw 5,000 hungry people in need of their daily bread. "Give them something to eat," he said. I kept thinking throughout the trip that those words were for me. And I did my best to keep writing and keep giving something to eat to all those who had come across the pond with me. And in a mysterious and counter-intuitive way I am not tired at all but in fact deeply rested, and what I had to give not diminished but multiplied, and my soul not hungry but deeply satisfied.
Everything became clear for me while preparing for one of my Oxford classes on Augustine and reading his book On Christian Teaching. In it, Augustine begins with a reflection on the feeding of the 5,000 and its parallel to the process of his writing. He says that he is beginning the work with a word inside him which, but knowing he does not yet have the whole book in mind. For that, he says, he leaves it to God to provide, likening it to the fish and loaves Jesus provided to the multitude by the Sea. Augustine says he has only enough to begin to write with, but trusts that in the end it will be enough to end with also -- and even more. He says this because he believes that in the miracle of God's economy there is always enough of that which is meant to be shared.
My train finally reaches its destination at Heathrow. I go up the steps and discover one of the gates has been opened and I walk through without paying anything. There is no British bobbie in sight. I have saved £15, which I will use to purchase a few additional gifts for friends back home.
It is good to receive, I think to myself, and as our Lord said even better to give. But above all it seems best to both receive and give. This trip, this moveable feast, has definitely been both.
And Jesus took the fish and the bread and he blessed them and he broke them and he gave them to the disciples to give to the multitude. All were satisfied. And after it was all said and done and finally time to go home, there were 12 basketsfull leftover.
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