In June last year I wrote about the messages in our church visitors book, the most frequent being simply, ‘Thank you for being open’. Others included: ‘A special place – blissfully peaceful’; ‘I feel the depth of peace in this place’; ‘Extraordinary – too lovely for words’, and ‘I am not a religious person but found it very peaceful and just sat for a while – could be very easy to just meditate for hours’. When a church is open, it invites people to come in. It is a sign of a God who is invitational. As you may know, through this Summer we have been holding a series of Iona Evening Worship services, one in each of our six Benefice churches. Next to the Abbey on Iona is St Martin’s Cross, where it has been rooted in its original spot for 1200 years. Carved on the east face of the cross are jewel-like bosses and an interweaving Celtic pattern, symbolic of the intertwining of earth and heaven, the sacred and the secular. George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community, famously said of Iona: ‘Iona is a very thin place. There is only a tissue-paper layer between things material and things spiritual’. While reflecting on this it dawned on me that there is a link between the messages in our visitors book and George MacLeod’s wonderful description of Iona as a thin place Maybe, along with many others, our little church is also a thin place where the connection between things material and things spiritual can be found. In essence people built our churches and set them apart for something special, and our visitors and others can sense this – they are thin places. Simon Pratten
Something recently caused me to pause and reflect on the many different relationships and interactions we have with others in our village and Benefice communities. These happen in so many ways, through more the formal committees of, say, the Parish Council or PCC, to the running of fund raising and community events, the WI, Book Groups and so many more. For us to enjoy being involved and work well together, lying at the heart of it is the hugely important word trust. Trust can take a long time to build, but then can be all too easily lost, however inadvertently. The building of trust begins with how we each interact with others and of course vice versa, which sounds very obvious, but how do we learn to trust each other? Self-awareness is another important building block of trust and not long ago I came across these words on building relationships, perhaps providing some food for thought: People ‘hear’ by what you do People ‘hear’ by how you listen to them People ‘hear’ by how you respond to them
