You will have heard many a clergy person contrast the hurly burly pressure filled advertisement soaked run up to Christmas with the true nature of the Advent season, which to remind you is reflective, penitent, peaceful the season of waiting. But I wonder has it done any good? There is an upside down feeling about the church’s calendar and the one the world is on. I once had a parish where church services were held in a building that doubled as a community centre and village hall. At this time of year the hall would be fully crammed with tinsel and parties for everyone from the buggy group to the old age pensioners and many in between. We of course in our purple are in the season of fasting, Christmastide our season of feasting begins on Christmas day and continues for a few weeks afterwards - by then the hall was booked out with weight watcher meetings.
The world turns, the Christmas engine is running at high speed (We enjoyed last year’s television broadcast of all the preparations which are made here for example) so let’s just accept that this is the way it is, we ARE in the season of rush not the season of waiting.
My wife Frances among other things is interested in trains while as everyone knows I am interested in old books. In a rare confluence of interest I was reading about the Flying Scotsman in a 1936 account in its heyday. The article was called “The Great North Road of Steel” and is starry eyed about the efforts made to make the journey in the announced time. The train left Kings Cross at 10.00 a.m. precisely, while its sister simultaneously left Edinburgh. So well tuned was the system that the point where the trains passed one another, near Tollerton, could be pinned down to within a yard or so. To manage the non stop trip there was a relief crew on board.
They reached the footplate through a specially constructed passage that made its way through the tender where they could swap with the first team without stopping the train. The engine began with 5000 gallons of water in its tank which needed replenishing, so the tender as well as this secret passage was fitted with a device for filling the tank while the train travelled. For this purpose long water troughs were laid between the rails - at Stevenage, Peterborough, Newark, Scrooby, Northallerton and Bedford - and at the appropriate points the engine driver operates a control lowering a scoop up which the water is forced by the speed at which the train is travelling. By this method an additional 8000 gallons is picked up; every pick up had to be timed to the instant since the scoop was in the water trough for only a few seconds.
So here we are rushing towards the 25th December and I suggest we too need replenishing. Maybe we can learn from the non-stop Flying Scotsmen and replenish on the move?
Prayerfulness is most often characterised as times of stillness, of quiet, times set aside to be with God and these is important , valuable, I would say vital practice. But what if we during our headlong business lower a scoop and pick up nourishment as we go along? Well we can, in all our days there are moments in between for example when we turn from one thing to another or occasionally when we have to wait for someone or something. However brief these are moments for effective praying, maybe about your next task, about someone, about your present anxieties, about the world - God will hear, his troughs of spiritual blessing are not limited to Peterborough or Newark but are there for us to dip into all the time and even if only for a few seconds we will find refreshment.
No comments:
Post a Comment