A View From The Vicarage - June

Dear Friends,

 Welcome to the Sundays after Trinity

Under normal circumstances, when I sit down to write this letter at the beginning of the season after Pentecost, we’d all be looking forward with excitement, apprehension or a combination of the two to a summer season crowded and highlighted by the myriad events which provide the backdrop to the British summer from Garden and Village Fetes via concerts, talks, sports fixtures, agricultural shows and presentations.

Alongside the local events there are, of course, the national ones Wimbledon, the Royal Welsh Show, the Chelsea Flower Show and the rest. This year was also due to be an Olympic and Paralympic Year.   Apart from these news headlining events are the personal occasions, weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, summer holidays public examinations and so on.

A Summer denuded of these highlights is going to feel a very strange summer indeed. 2020 is certainly turning rapidly into a year which will look and feel very different indeed. Without those events which anchor our lives, it becomes very easy to feel adrift torn away from all of those precious moments which give shape and colour to our lives the sense of isolation and detachment from the rest of society can become very acute indeed.

How reassuring that the beginning of this month also opens with Trinity Sunday and following it the return of those wonderful Sundays after Trinity. I’m one of those people who grieved when the ASB replaced the Sundays after Trinity with the Sundays after Pentecost and also when the Church in Wales decided to follow suit.

For me there’s something very familiar, very comforting, very British and profoundly reassuring about those long Summer weeks after Trinity which guide us through the warmth of Summer into the cooler, darker days of Autumn. The point in the year when we’ve left behind us the high wire act of Lent, Passiontide, Easter and Pentecost and Advent and Christmas are just tinsel draped specks on the horizon.

In a time of considerable uncertainty and global anxiety, in a year when the vast majority of the events which give colour and shape to our lives and grist to our memories are cancelled or abandoned, along come the Sundays after Trinity to remind us that even in the midst of crisis and confusion some things are unchanged and unchanging. The arrival of the Sundays after Trinity like the changing of the seasons remind us of immutability and permanence even at a time when a microscopic virus has changed so much that we hold dear perhaps irrevocably. So let’s rejoice in the return of the Sundays after Trinity, exulting in their quiet unassuming reminder that as Julian of Norwich, who Denis wrote so

beautifully about in last month’s edition, recalls and asserts: “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”

In God’s time, they are, they were and they always will be Covid-19 or anything else notwithstanding. Until then please take care keep safe and as Nurses receiving the wounded from the Dunkirk beaches were told 80 years ago, “May our God go with you” even if that’s only down the garden path!!

With my love and prayers, as always

Ben.