Ruth on the train to London as she sets off on seven weeks of travel. Credit: Iona Community/ N. Austin
I write this while I’m on the move. For the next seven weeks I’ll be ‘travelling in the spirit.’ The first five weeks are a pilgrimage across Canada. I’ll mostly be listening – to our Members and Associate Members, our partners, friends and First Nations people. We’ll be reflecting on what it means to be ‘rooted in hope: lived in community’. And I’m delighted to be going on to Cape Town, at the invitation of the Volmoed Community, to help them celebrate their 40th birthday.
I’m particularly delighted to be taking the Fingerprint Labyrinth with me across Canada – a powerful symbol of our commitment to action rooted in contemplation. I will also carry each of you with me as we pray our way together through these days and weeks, in community.
Along with the labyrinth, and our prayers (and quite a heavy bag!) I will also be carrying some questions with me. I’d like to share these with you, and invite you to ponder them as we journey together….
I am now in the last 9 months of my time as Leader, and am aware I’m entering a more reflective stage. This has also been a busy few months with big, and sometimes tough decisions to be made. I am convinced we will rise stronger through these tricky times. My hope is that these questions might help us not just to rise, but also to dip deep into our story, and the story of our faith, under the larger questions: ‘what does God require of us?’
I invite you to dip into these questions too as you are so drawn:
- What is the hope in which we are rooted? What does it look, feel, taste, sound like?
- When we think of our Community, the Iona Community, in all the ways we are ‘gathered and scattered’, what are the emergent, the glimpsed ways in which we are living out this hope, in community?
- As we make decisions in community, how do we maintain the life-giving balance between nurturing vision while simultaneously tending scarce resources?
- In what ways today are we called to be bold, risk-taking in community?
- How do we best reflect what it means to be at once “Movement, Community and Organisation” (see the descriptions of these in our Charter).
- In our increasingly global community, how do we honour both the importance of being place-based, while also being scattered?
I have found these last months really tough. For me, in my role as Leader, the decision to close Camas has been heartbreaking.
I was reminded recently of an essay by Quaker Parker Palmer on ‘The Politics of the Brokenhearted.’ Palmer says “When the heart breaks, it takes only one soul-friend to help it break open instead of apart.” And “We think of heartbreak as a personal, not a political condition. But I believe that heartbreak offers a powerful lens through which to examine the well-being of the body politic.”
As we navigate this season in our life in Community, with difficult, necessary decisions which may also bring heartbreak, may we be soul friends to one another, so that as we break open in community we may also find strength and renewal together.
USA North East