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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley

Good morning.

The hours of daylight are gradually getting less. When we lived in the Southern Hemisphere the opposite was the case. In late August, days of winter began to lengthen into early signs of spring. I don’t think I quite got used to celebrating Christmas in the high heat of Summer, with a BBQ rather than a sit-down meal with all the trimmings. Sometimes I would be asked by friends ‘back home’ what it felt like to live on the edge of the world, as if there was a possibility of stepping to my left and somehow falling off the map.

The perspective of my local friends was that in fact we lived in the centre of the world not at its edge. I remembered the maps of the world from my childhood that placed certain countries in the centre and others out at the inevitable edges. Perspective on place matters, as does the recognition that the world doesn’t revolve around any one person, place or community. The inter-connectedness of our world has become a lived reality in ways most of us could not have imagined before this pandemic began. We have also had to learn to live apart from one another, and that has been tough.

From my schooldays, I remember a song about searching for a neighbour. The last line of the song says this: ‘wherever you travel, I’ll be there’. Jesus once told his friends: ‘remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age’. As I connect with people this new day, I hope I can recognise the value of being with someone else as well as the opportunities that times of solitude can bring.

God who became earthed in Jesus Christ teach us to connect and value one another so that this day may be a fresh opportunity for our perspective to be enriched. Amen.