��ѿ��ý

Available for over a year

Good Morning. It has absolutely nothing to do with my favourite football team, I told my congregation last week, when suggesting that they wear something bright red to church tomorrow. No, I suggested that a bright sea of red filling the church for the annual Feast of Pentecost would be entirely fitting because red traditionally represents the deep flames of fire in the dramatic biblical story of the Holy Spirit descending on the Church. In many ways tomorrow is also the birthday of the church as we know it. Because it is the day when the early Christians experienced a feeling which is so reassuring and necessary for the human condition: that, following Jesus’ Ascension, they were not, after all, completely on their own. For in many respects the Feast of Pentecost is the Feast of You are not alone. Many reports suggest that loneliness is on the increase across the age groups in society. It has been described variously as a silent epidemic or a plague of our times. Many young people risk becoming increasingly isolated, lacking interpersonal skills, in a digital age. And amongst an increasingly elderly population, the consequences of isolation are frightening and can be devastating. But many people I’ve talked to over several decades as a priest – who have lost loved ones - do manage to find companionship. Often this is through a close relationship with a family member or friend. Others speak of wonderful examples of neighbourliness. And it’s not only churchgoing people who say to me, after a bereavement for instance, that they feel God close to them or watching over them in a way that they find hard to explain: a still small voice, a comforter...call it what you will, but a sense that whoever the Holy Spirit is, can be experienced in a myriad of ways. In his hugely influential writings, at the turn of the century, the author M Scott Peck refers to the Holy Spirit as the unacknowledged accompanier who "often speaks when we least expect it." Just as when loneliness is wonderfully pierced and a light suddenly glimmers in the darkness of isolation. Perhaps so many popular songs which take up the theme of loneliness, including the famous “You’ll never walk alone” are played so often because they help us. Whether they provide comfort or spur us on to pray that we may never be alone – I believe they can also have the power to cajole us to do more to ensure that others are not alone either. The red vestments of Pentecost are, in a similar way, a vivid reminder to me that this feast of not being alone is an increasingly important day in highlighting the ongoing battle to combat loneliness.