'Illuminare' - award winning photo of myself, Josephine Inkpin, by Charmaine Lyons Pink Floyd surely had it right about the vocation of love, in the closing section of the rock opera The Wall. For the vocation of love does not belong to Christians, never mind clergy, but to all human beings, but Christians, and clergy, at our best, can help point us towards it. As Pink Floyd wrote:
All alone, or in twos
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down, outside the wall
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands
The bleeding hearts and the artists make their stand
And when they've given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall.
In my experience, ministry can certainly be like that. As it happens, the first music album I remember buying was appropriately entitled Walls and Bridges, by John Lennon. For core to my own ministry has been building bridges, and what the writer Ursula le Guin called the vocation of ‘unbuilding walls’. As I come to the end of my time as Minister of Pitt Street Uniting Church, I want therefore to reflect on such things, in the context of the Gospel story of the presentation of Jesus inside the temple walls. For in their own vocations of priesthood and prophetic love, waiting in holy desire, and glimpsing salvation in their own day, the old folks Simeon and Anna can still speak to us in our own spiritual journeys, now and for the days ahead…
All alone, or in twos
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down, outside the wall
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands
The bleeding hearts and the artists make their stand
And when they've given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall.
In my experience, ministry can certainly be like that. As it happens, the first music album I remember buying was appropriately entitled Walls and Bridges, by John Lennon. For core to my own ministry has been building bridges, and what the writer Ursula le Guin called the vocation of ‘unbuilding walls’. As I come to the end of my time as Minister of Pitt Street Uniting Church, I want therefore to reflect on such things, in the context of the Gospel story of the presentation of Jesus inside the temple walls. For in their own vocations of priesthood and prophetic love, waiting in holy desire, and glimpsing salvation in their own day, the old folks Simeon and Anna can still speak to us in our own spiritual journeys, now and for the days ahead…
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