An Absence of Presence

This morning I had the rare experience of getting ready for the 10.30am midweek service and having no congregation. I followed the standard practice of reading the service through to the Creed and finishing with the Prayer for the Church Militant, which you’re supposed to do just in case anyone turns up at the last moment. After that, you'd be into the Canon of the Mass, so newcomers have had it really.

This midweek service is the last relic of the time when Swanvale Halt, like many others, was a ‘daily mass church’ with a service of holy communion most days; and that wasn’t all that long ago, the tradition finally ending in the late 1990s. The Tuesday service survived because it was the one that had most people attending, but it’s gone up and down over the years. When I arrived in 2009, the church was trying to build it up into a social occasion for older people with refreshments and board games afterwards, but that never took off. Sometimes there have been just a couple of us present, sometimes as many as 15. The congregation tended to be older people who found a long Sunday service too much, and others who happened to be around at that time. At the moment we don’t have many people that applies to.

I’m committed to the idea that the holy eucharist should be offered on a weekday, but I wonder if 10.30am on Tuesday is the right time. Over the years I’ve floated the idea of celebrating the service at a variety of different points – early morning for people before they go to work, after school drop-off, lunchtime, or the evening as folk head home from work – anything that would make it easier for people to build some time for God into their busy lives. No suggestion has ever resulted in much, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be made again.

As today was St Benedict’s Day, this is a precis of what I was going to say in my homily, so it doesn’t go to waste: I sometimes tell myself, ‘well, I can reuse that in a few years’ time’, but I never remember!

Readings: Proverbs 2.1-6, Luke 18.18-22

I didn’t know before preparing my homily that, after some years, a group of the monks at the monastery St Benedict founded and led decided they couldn’t bear him any more and tried to poison him. If you look at our icon of St Benedict in the church, you’ll see a broken chalice, which I think refers to that legend. Nobody has tried to poison me yet as far as I know, but the story shows rather graphically that living in a Christian community can be as far from easy as it’s possible to be. That’s what Benedict and his monks were prepared to undergo to follow the spiritual life. They’d already done what Jesus describes in the Gospel reading today and ‘given up all their possessions’, and you might imagine they could be tempted to say to God, ‘Isn’t that enough, Lord?’ but apparently not! It’s even more costly than that.

We’re prone to take prayer and the presence of God for granted because we can do it any time and any place. But in reality, these things are (as the reading from Proverbs says) silver and treasure, a gift which is the most precious thing we could have. Compared to what we receive from God, our richest possessions are dust, and the dangers we might encounter no more threatening than a mown field, if we see things rightly. What might we be prepared to undergo for the sake of that treasure? Amen.